This has long seemed to me a kind of death:
this losing of youth's visage;
onto soft, slender cheeks the mask of man
clamps down-harsh, bearded, red.
How do they bear this losing of their youth?
Suddenly one is just another cog-
no longer young and no longer wondrous
and yet alone.
No longer is one brotherly with trees,
leaning at one's window, one no loger shines out;
grown men, armed with any sort of pretext,
crowd around the quiet garden bench
where once they happily ignored the youth.
They gauge him by their common measures-
he, who was once for them some odd foreigner;
they put their stupid hat upon his hair,
which for years has been blowing in all breezes.
And he has a hundred images and prayers
that suddenly are withered, without effect.
He must cease bowing in the wind,
and not show anyone
that in his heart all violins
are his sisters.
What has drawn him on
in darkness-
all that's unconscious-
must cease to be.
No longer may the evening
find him alone:
only among like-minded ones.
Yet of those many:
Who muses on things the same as he?
Who stands bowed over God?
Who keeps silent?
Who with all his gestures indicates the sea?
Who dreams of girls as if
of evening hours?
And where
might that one be found
who fled form the garish feast of men?
The sheen of dancing girls
is what they love;
to use their wit and come out winners,
to seize with all their senses,
is what they crave.
Among them, what should they do
with his dream-endowed
bright serenity,
how should he talk with them
when from each one
he's severed by a hundred wonders.
How should he laugh along
over a sly reply...
and after many a cup
wake up with them to morning,
to that daily, thousand-faceted event
that moves him so differently?
No matter how blunt their actions,
he'll stay on among them:
a youth, conducted into manhood.
He'll go about, as they, in current fashions,
in a city suit, with polished shoes,
but in the forests, in a light loden mantle
he'll walk the old trails barefoot.
Manhood, in the form it nears us,
manhood of the weighty daily deed-
this manhood is a disguising
of longings and laces:
a nasty affair.
A growing-similar to everyone,
so that those whose gaze
is on the crowd won't pick us out,
and a concealing of ourselves-
from which we'll feel such rue
in the bride's silent, inquiring eyes.
No, let me quietly go on being
what I perhaps still am,
so that my solitary days may bear me
toward manhood differently.
I still have my first growth of beard,
my tender strength trembles
along my arms' shaft,
barely broken out in bloom.
I don't know what I will become,
nor what I was to be,
I can only replicate the earth's
deep gestures.
I have storm and stillness,
clarity and dusk;
my will is absorbed in growing
and young...
this losing of youth's visage;
onto soft, slender cheeks the mask of man
clamps down-harsh, bearded, red.
How do they bear this losing of their youth?
Suddenly one is just another cog-
no longer young and no longer wondrous
and yet alone.
No longer is one brotherly with trees,
leaning at one's window, one no loger shines out;
grown men, armed with any sort of pretext,
crowd around the quiet garden bench
where once they happily ignored the youth.
They gauge him by their common measures-
he, who was once for them some odd foreigner;
they put their stupid hat upon his hair,
which for years has been blowing in all breezes.
And he has a hundred images and prayers
that suddenly are withered, without effect.
He must cease bowing in the wind,
and not show anyone
that in his heart all violins
are his sisters.
What has drawn him on
in darkness-
all that's unconscious-
must cease to be.
No longer may the evening
find him alone:
only among like-minded ones.
Yet of those many:
Who muses on things the same as he?
Who stands bowed over God?
Who keeps silent?
Who with all his gestures indicates the sea?
Who dreams of girls as if
of evening hours?
And where
might that one be found
who fled form the garish feast of men?
The sheen of dancing girls
is what they love;
to use their wit and come out winners,
to seize with all their senses,
is what they crave.
Among them, what should they do
with his dream-endowed
bright serenity,
how should he talk with them
when from each one
he's severed by a hundred wonders.
How should he laugh along
over a sly reply...
and after many a cup
wake up with them to morning,
to that daily, thousand-faceted event
that moves him so differently?
No matter how blunt their actions,
he'll stay on among them:
a youth, conducted into manhood.
He'll go about, as they, in current fashions,
in a city suit, with polished shoes,
but in the forests, in a light loden mantle
he'll walk the old trails barefoot.
Manhood, in the form it nears us,
manhood of the weighty daily deed-
this manhood is a disguising
of longings and laces:
a nasty affair.
A growing-similar to everyone,
so that those whose gaze
is on the crowd won't pick us out,
and a concealing of ourselves-
from which we'll feel such rue
in the bride's silent, inquiring eyes.
No, let me quietly go on being
what I perhaps still am,
so that my solitary days may bear me
toward manhood differently.
I still have my first growth of beard,
my tender strength trembles
along my arms' shaft,
barely broken out in bloom.
I don't know what I will become,
nor what I was to be,
I can only replicate the earth's
deep gestures.
I have storm and stillness,
clarity and dusk;
my will is absorbed in growing
and young...