Sol 5.6

  1. Most of life is vain; the little of it

    is pure serenity, granted as though in haste.

  2. Many a moment, brief in itself, has stretched its shadow

    after passing, like a great tree in the garden.

  3. And it passes through memory, a phantom of its youth,

    as though its awakening were a second youth.

  4. Who is that delicate apparition beside me,

    both his palms asleep within my palm?

  5. It was as though we, with the earth rolling away beneath us,

    were two stars alone in the darkness;

  6. as though we, with the wind beneath our course,

    were two lines in the decrees of fate, racing onward.

  7. I turned toward your place after

    I had left it vacant, and wept at the wretchedness of my own place.

  8. Was that closeness anything but anguish,

    and hunger’s cry unto deprivation—

  9. a fever decreed upon humankind,

    to last as long as Earth keeps turning?

  10. As though this life, with all its people

    and all its clamor, were a kind of delirium.

Sol 5.6