Loss - by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I missed the anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the 4th of February, but here is a poem to mark the occasion.

Picture from here.

VERGANGENHEIT – LOSS!

You walk away – love’s happiness and sore pain.

What name shall I give you? Distress, life, bliss,

part of myself, my heart – times past? All gone?

The door slams shut,

I hear your footsteps slowly die away.

What is left when you are gone? Joy, anguish, longing?

I know only this: you go away – and all is gone.

Can you feel now, how I clutch at you,

how I hold you so tight

that it must hurt you?

How I open the wounds,

that your blood may flow,

only to be sure that you keep close to me,

you, so full of real and earthly life?

Can you sense that I have now a terrible longing

for my own suffering?

That I yearn to see my own blood flow,

only that all may not sink

into times that are gone?

Life, what have you done to me?

Why did you come? Why do you pass away?

Times past, if you flee from me,

are you not still my past, mine?

As the sun sets ever more quickly over the ocean,

sucked into the darkness,

so sinks and sinks and sinks,

relentlessly,

your image into the seas of forgetfulness,

engulfed in a few waves.

As a puff of warm breath

dissolves in the cool air of morning,

so fades your image,

until your face, your hands, your figure

I no longer know.

A laugh, a glance, a gesture appears to me,

then it fades,

disappears,

without comfort, without your nearness,

it is destroyed,

an illusion from the past.

I want to breathe the air of your being,

absorb it, lose myself in it,

as on a hot summer’s day, the heavy blossom

invites the bees,

and intoxicates them;

as the mohawk becomes drunk from the privet;

but a rough wind destroys the fragrance and the

          blossom,

and I stand like a fool,

as all vanishes and is gone.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer