Walk Through This Town

Walk through this town at a gray hour

when sorrow hides in shady gates

and children play with great balls

that float like kites above

the poisoned wells of courtyards,

and, quiet, doubting, the last blackbird sings.

Think about your life which goes on,

though it’s already lasted so long.

Could you voice the smallest fragment of the whole.

Could you name baseness when you saw it.

If you met someone truly living

would you know it?

Did you abuse high words?

Whom should you have been, who knows.

You love silence, and you’ve mastered

only silence, listening to words, music, and quiet:

why did you begin to speak, who knows.

Why in this age, why in a country

that wasn’t born yet, who knows.

Why among exiles, in a flat that had been

German, amid grief and mourning

and vain hopes of a regained myth.

Why a childhood shadowed

by mining towers and not a forest’s dark,

near a stream where a quiet dragonfly keeps watch

over the world’s secret wholeness

—who knows.

And your love, which you lost and found,

and your God, who won’t help those

who seek him,

and hides among theologians

with degrees.

Why just this town at a gray hour,

this dry tongue, these numb lips,

and so many questions before you leave

and go home to the kingdom

from which silence, rapture, and the wind

once came.