Success and Failure - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I find this quite a strange poem, but I do like the stanza. I don't know what the copyright position is with modern poets, who are yet dead, but here is another by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Picture from here.
GLÜCK UND UNGLÜCK - SUCCESS AND FAILURE
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Success and failure
suddenly strike and overpower us,
both the same at first,
like the touch of burning heat and freezing cold,
indistinguishable.
Like meteors
flung from distant heavens,
blazing and threatening,
over our heads.
Those visited stand bemused
amidst the ruins
of their dull, daily lives.
Proud and exalted,
destroying, subduing,
success and failure,
invited or uninvited,
hold festival with
those shattered people.
Dressed and decorated,
the visited
prepare for the sacrificial feast.
Success is full of foreboding,
failure has its sweetness.
Without distinction they appear to come,
the one or the other,
from the unknown.
Both are proud and terrible.
People come from far and wide,
walk by and look,
pausing to stare,
half envious, half afraid,
at the outrage,
where the supernatural,
blessing and cursing at the same time,
entangling and disentangling,
sets forth the drama of human life.
What is success and what is failure?
Time alone distinguishes.
When the incomprehensible, exciting,
sudden event
lapses into wearisome waiting,
when the creeping hours of the day
first reveal the true outlines of failure,
then most give up,
weary of the monotony
of oft-repeated failure,
disappointed and bored with themselves.
That is the hour of steadfast love,
the hour of the mother and the beloved,
the hour of the friend and the brother.
Steadfast love transforms all failure,
and gently cradles it
in the soft
radiance of heavenly light.