to be driven off so easily;Stronger than fear or destructive mother-love, it
stood flickering;
The frogs helped also, whirring away.
Yet how I have learned to know that look in your
eyes
Of horrid sorrow!
How I know that glitter of salt, dry, sterile,
sharp, corrosive salt!
Not tears, but white sharp brine
Making hideous your eyes.
I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my
chest, my belly,
Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through
my defenceless nakedness.
I have been thrust into white, sharp crystals,
Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated.
Ah, Lot's Wife, Lot's Wife!
The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column
of salt, like a waterspout
That has enveloped me!
Snow of salt, white, burning, eating salt
In which I have writhed.
Lot's Wife!—Not Wife, but Mother.
I have learned to curse your motherhood,
You pillar of salt accursed.
I have cursed motherhood because of you,
Accursed, base motherhood!
I long for the time to come, when the curse against
you will have gone out of my heart.
But it has not gone yet.
Nevertheless, once, the frogs, the globe-flowers of
Bavaria, the glow-worms
Gave me sweet lymph against the salt-burns,
There is a kindness in the very rain.
Therefore, even in the hour of my deepest, pas-
sionate malediction
I try to remember it is also well between us.
That you are with me in the end.
That you never look quite back; nine-tenths, ah,
more
You look round over your shoulder;
But never quite back.
Nevertheless the curse against you is still in my
heart
Like a deep, deep burn.
The curse against all mothers.
All mothers who fortify themselves in motherhood,
devastating the vision.
They are accursed, and the curse is not taken off
It burns within me like a deep, old burn,
And oh, I wish it was better.
BEUERBERG
On the Balcony
IN front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost
ribbon of rainbow;
And between us and it, the thunder;
And down below in the green wheat, the labourers
Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.
You are near to me, and your naked feet in their
sandals,
And through the scent of the balcony's naked
timber
I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the
limber
Lightning falls from heaven.
Adown the pale-green glacier river floats
A dark boat through the gloom—and whither?
The thunder roars. But still we have each other!
The naked lightnings in the heavens dither
And disappear—what have we but each other?
The boat has gone.
ICKING
Frohnleichnam
You have come your way, I have come my way;
You have stepped across your people, carelessly,
hurting them all;
I have stepped across my people, and hurt them
in spite of my care.
But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding
We have come our ways and met at last
Here in this upper room.
Here the balcony
Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons
slowly
Go by with their loads of green and silver birch-
trees
For the feast of Corpus Christi.
Here from the balcony
We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-
green river
Goes between the pine-woods,
Over and beyond to where the many mountains
