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Wednesday, 15 January 2020

Verklärte Nacht (After Dehmel and Schoenberg.)




The moon was as alive 
As its thousand stars.
Under that moon, hand in hand,
The couple walked into the forest’s darkness.
She, with another man’s child.
He, carrying fervent hope.

The trees were stone-still:
Existing with little life.
The trunks’ lead-grey sharpened momentarily
In the clean light
Which shone down from the moon.
Farther into the forest
The trees became tighter -
Far too familiar for light.
The trees - perplexed, crooked,
And strangling each other.
Each tree, alone in the crowd,
Held its plot tightly.
Yet, at times, 
A tree would fling out its colonising branches
In its fight to gain the precious air
And the living space of a nutrient earth.

The deeper they walked,
The tighter their grip became.
They haunted themselves with the forest-night.
That something must come of this.

Something magical did work its way
Between the trees,
Up the broad trunks,
And down the long branches.
It was a current of earth-power
Which charged the trees' sap.
Whatever that buzzed that night
Ran through the couple too.
That moving, quiet, something,
Fused them to the trees,
And the trees to them.
That Something must come of this.

“I can cherish him, as if my own.
I could teach him the things I know.
The paths I’ve travelled.
The things I believe.”

At the moment of these thoughts,
The unborn was transfigured
By the earth-current’s mineral light.
The forest, in turn, transfigured itself
With the chemical earth.
And the midnight forest
Harmonised with the man, the woman,
And the unborn child.
Then two became three.

Hand in hand,
And hand on womb,
Together they walked
(Through the welcoming forest)
Into their uncertain future -
A future that was opening wide
And burning brightly
At the forest’s end.






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