narrow ladle of legends.
2. BEGGARS WALK THE ROAD
O, how I want to love the Lord,
just as His paupers do.
I want to walk the towns
and plead in His name true,
to learn it all and then forget,
to start to talk like the dumb or dead
of His sweet beauty too.
You think a candle stands here,
and that Lent is a quiet garden?
But if it is a garden, they will enter
and perhaps won’t find any faith within,
and candles spin no happiness here
but ruefully hang down.
And therefore you must close your door
and bury your clear mind:
it will spring up if alive,
whilst you must lie and wait behind.
And follow or bring inside
whoever wants to enter.
Don’t pick or choose between them:
a horrible sight they all are,
like worms on a wheel they all are.
And what if they kill me?
Then let that be too:
you’ll be given your medicine—
a few drops of blue.
And if my home is burned?
—So let it fall
for it isn’t your home at all.
3. A SHEPHERD PLAYS
In a heraldic garden small
vines begin to bloom.
“Here we come!”
from a window they call,
and fourteen merry goat kids
leap over a flute.
Yes, they leap over a flute,
or they bound over a pipe,
no animals more charming
has anyone ever seen.
The Lord stinted the rest.
Their fur is the best,
as bold as a youthful abyss—
looking, breathing and stirring,
filling the heart with bliss.
Yet in every living man
the heart is dark and poor,
he is a cripple all inside:
come what may—who cares,
he will not sit down with us
dressed in proper clothes
to serve the blooming vines
to his merry goat kids.
Just as the Lord bids.
4. SON OF THE MUSES
Strange images and pictures
will enter through closed doors,
will find their own names
and something for me to do.
They’ll pour my simple reason
just like sand onto the shore,
rock it like a cradle,
or weave it into a basket.
And they will ask:
what do you see?
And I shall say:
all I can see
are waves beating the shore.
Waves beating without end,
for a lofty wave is a chest
for the best and most beautiful ring
and a cellar for wine, the best.
Let the deep swallow its visions
or let it rumble like a furnace,
it will carry us out—
But where?
Wherever we happen to go,
wherever we are told.
But where, my spirit, but where?
O, how should I know?
The abyss is better than a shepherd
at tending its own flocks:
visible to no one
they climb all over the hills
and play there like the stars.
Their constant ringing,
their milky way,
scatters like mercury far away
and then comes back to us:
For poor are folk, and scant is our tale,
for all end here, and the world has long forgotten us.
As Policrates threw his ring
to whatever was meant to be—
whoever was poor,
whoever was rich,
whoever waged wars,
or tended calves—
the most precious
of
