Sacred Twilight
Georg Trakl

Silence at the forest’s edge encounters 
A dark stag; 
On the hill, evening’s breeze quietly fades, 

The plaint of the blackbird hushes 
And the gentle flutes of autumn 
Fall silent in the reeds. 

You float on black clouds 
Drunk on poppies 
The nocturnal pond, 

The starry sky. 
Forever sounds the lunar voice of the sister 
Through the sacred night. 

Translated by Glenn Wallis

Geistliche Dämmerung  

Stille begegnet am Saum des Waldes  
Ein dunkles Wild;  
Am Hügel endet leise der Abendwind,  

Verstummt die Klage der Amsel  
Und die sanften Flöten des Herbstes  
Schweigen im Rohr.  

Auf schwarzer Wolke  
Befährst du trunken von Mohn  
Den nächtigen Weiher,  

Den Sternenhimmel.  
Immer tönt der Schwester mondene Stimme  
Durch die geistliche Nacht.  

_______________________

DREAM IMAGE COMMENTARY
Glenn Wallis

It is the silence of matter annihilating the sacred dream — mind’s weft, the works of the yearning spirit.  

Are you not a dark stag? Did you think your were a god? For the gods are the wind and their naming. Silence is the speech of mute beasts, who live in the forest, our home, of timber, stone, and shit. 

The gentle flutes of autumn fall silent in the reeds; the stag and the blackbird respond. 

The danger here is more than the willfulness of our human narcissism. Hovering above the earth in the black wisdom of your “knowing,” that poppy of “forever” will make you drunk.  

But the poet has the kindness to remind us that the night is spectral. Long before forever, every star in the nocturnal pond will burn out. Our heaven, once lit, however dimly, by our dying lunar sister, will fall into absolute darkness. The glories of heaven and earth will become coal-like husks of matter. Stellar corpses will be scattered through space. The last atom will cease to exist.  

The poet awakens in us a searing, living memory of our ancestral scope. His “edge” establishes a line of horizon that renders facile all notions of earth, indeed, cosmos, as  “home.” How much more so does it obliterate fantasies of an unscathed exit, such as heaven or rebirth? How infinitesimally puny does the ostensible cognitive fizzle known as “enlightenment” appear against the cosmic catastrophe. Ancestral anamnesis means: remember, remember! 

____________________
Image: “Twilight Woods,” tonalist oil painting, M Francis McCarthy.