FALL, MY HEART

Fall, my heart, from the tree of time,
fall, you leaves, from icy branches
that once the sun embraced,
fall, as tears fall from the widened eye!

For days the earth god's hair blows in the wind
about his sun-worn brow,
whilst his fist clenches
the gaping wound beneath his shirt.

So be hard when the tender back of a cloud
bows down to you once more.
Pay no heed to the Hymettus bee,
should he fill your honeycomb again.

For a straw in times of drought means little to the peasant,
a summer little to our great lineage.

And to what can your heart attest?
Between yesterday and tomorrow it swings,
foreign and mute,
and what it beats,
is its fall out of time.


Ingeborg Bachmann, in The storm of roses, Selected Poems