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I

Slender glow of minaret and silent muezzins
In the sudden echo. Summer sears the early evening
And mothers arrive to turn to stone
Before our eyes, good down-to-earth women
        In our daily world.

We call out, we ring out — in a gigantic bursting,
And they advance down twilight paths, extending their hands
(Like half-burnt candles) across the dying agony
Of the last sunlit blade of grass, good herb-healers they
        In our daily world.

Does the believer’s footfall still ring out
As old as the blood reversing the flow of time
          In ancestral sacrifice?

Slender minaret like a lance of sunlight
Snapped in our chest. Night falls on a world turned to stone,
And our destiny (like bitter ice) melts coolly
On the muezzins’ tongues, cunningly lulled to sleep
        In our daily world.

Broken, dismembered, we’re threaded on sneers —
Yet they stare through the children into dusk-filled ravines: silent.
Silent and pathless the land in the night that is falling
For those without support, for the clouded mind, for the seed flung
        In our daily world.

Why have we come to the very bottom of the landscape
Of gilded bells swinging aloft
        Stubbornly silent?

II

Time itself is wind-tossed. And people are ill-tempered.
The rains seem to have washed out the sky’s new colour,
Washed out the faces we have carried through the world clutched in our
                                                                                                  hands.
Besides: Is there a way out? That encounter with a threat.
It’s grown tall day and night like the trunk of some nameless tree
Blocking the view, rotting the view with its spreading branches.
Besides: Hasn’t even the fringe of places become impassable? That time
Of flowering has gone, the time of pouring your face into the cup that goes
round.

We looked for light in the windows. We did not find it.
As always, the empty skies piled on the heads of sleepwalkers.
Besides: Even this cry of a child, the flight of the bat?
That boy’s body beyond the reach of healing herbs
And very soon now the moment of its conciliation — that sponge,
Now clean, of flesh and blood. Night has made it its own.
Where was the world, boy: in the tangle of incomprehension
Or in the closing nets of misfortune?

Emptiness has come.
Fulfilment of the wish for rest.
Prematurely we pluck the fruit of the nameless tree
Whose spreading branches we now again see clearly before us
And whose spiky thorns we had so quickly forgotten.
And once more, boy of darkness, we are in some circle
In who knows what magic landscape of living and dying,
Like fleshy blood-soaked sponges abandoned under the skies.

The mere thought of it might turn us in a safer direction.
Noisy laughter of the other boys. But ours was dead.
And once more, boy of lightness, we find ourselves trapped. We hear
The voices of the last cockerels and muezzins
On the silent divide, at the mute moment of daybreak.