Classic Poem

O light-engulfing
dense black nightfall,
the day's unfeeling corpse,
igniting the sunset peaks
with treasures of many shapes and colors,
like some ascetic woman
of the cremation ground,
thick tangled tresses in wild disorder,
smeared with the universal ash,
motionless, entranced:
have you entered into ecstasy
and vanished on the snowy ridges? —
vast death's shadow,
form taken by the immense void.

Like an ocean all solid blackness,
clashing planes of terrifying shades
surging from earth to sky,
every instant every instant
you smash the reefs of our consciousness
and frighten earth's poor children.

Great sleep
descending on unmoving feet,
shutting in the earth,
light's negation from the underworld —
before the horror of you
living souls must close their eyes
and swoon away.

This much only is it then,
all the dazzling, varied history of the world?
Heart of a mute mystery invisible,
Speak, breathless darkness!
Do unheard tides of the great emptiness,
flooding black, exploding and engulfing,
batter and devour the shores? —
Is this life like a vessel
filled only with
the void?

O earth, O earth!
I shrivel to a mustard seed,
pulverized,
my head blanked out utterly.

Doubting my own existence
that glimmers, minute particle of brightness,
like that paltry star
in the fissure of a cloud,
suffocated,
minuscule,
without a hope.

You robber of all my vanished wealth,
black prison of things past,
split, burst out,
break open your own ruthless breast,
female beautiful as the world's cremation!
Lo, mindless night,
within you is the Imperishable,
the Imperishable
the stars the stars!