Georg Trakl

3 February 1887 - 3 November 1914 / Salzburg

Decay

A wind is blowing! The green lights

Sing extinguished - large and satiated

The moon fulfils the high hall,

Where no more celebrations sound through.

The ancestral portraits quietly smile

And far-off - their last shadow fell,

The room is sultry with putrefaction,

Arround which ravens mutely move in circles.

A lost sense of past times

Looks from the stony masks,

Pain distorted and empty of existence

Mourning in abandonments.

Sick smells of sunken gardens

Quietly caress the decay -

Like the echo of sobbing words

Quivering over open crypts.
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