From “Flight and Metamorphosis”

Who dies

here last

will carry the grain of sun

between his lips

will thundercrack the night

in death-throe rot.

Blood-

sparked dreams

will shoot from his shoulders

in a jagged flash

branding empyreal skin

with the mystery of affliction.

Because Noah’s ark went down

star-figured avenues

whoever

dies here last

will have shoes

filled with water

where a fish

with homesick backsail

draws black dissolving time

into its tomb.

This is the dark breath

of Sodom

and the burden

of Nineveh

cast off

at the open wound

of our door.

This the sacred writing

in flight from the land

all its letters climbing

skyward

feathered blessedness

finding refuge in a honeycomb.

This the black Laocoön

cast on our eyelid

perforating millennia

uprooted grieftree

sprouting in our pupil.

These are salt-stiffened fingers

teardropping in prayer.

This His ocean’s tow

dragged back

into the rushing shell of secrets.

This our ebb

star of agony

from our moldering sand—

The Hunter

my constellation

takes aim

at a secret bloodpoint: Unrest ...

and the footstep flees without asylum—

But the wind is no house

just licks the body’s wounds

like an animal—

Yet how should we pull time

from the sun’s golden threads?

Coil

night

for the silk butterfly’s cocoon?

O Darkness

spread your legation wide

for the blink of an eye:

rest on the flight.

So far out, in the open,

cushioned in sleep.

In flight from the land

with love’s heavy luggage.

A butterfly-zone of dreams

like an open parasol

held up against the truth.

Night

night

nightdress body

stretching its emptiness

while space expands

from dust without song.

Sea

with prophetic tongues of spray

rolls

over the death shroud

till sun again sows

each second’s blaze of pain.

In flight

what great welcome

along the way—

Shrouded

in the winds’ shawl

feet in the sand’s prayer

which can never say Amen

because it must move

from fin to wing

and further—

The sick butterfly

soon again knows the sea—

This stone

with the fly’s inscription

has dropped into my hand—

In place of home

I hold the metamorphoses of the world—

Dancer

like a bride

from blind space

you receive

the budding desire

of creation’s distant days—

With your body’s musical avenues

you graze on the air

there

where the earth

seeks new entry

to birth.

Through

night-lava

like eyelids

softly opening

the first cry

of creation’s volcano

flickers.

In the branches of your limbs

the premonitions build

their twittering nests.

Like a milkmaid

in twilight

your fingertips tug

the secret sources

of light

till you—pierced by the

trial of evening—

deliver your eyes

to the moon, for the nightwatch.

Dancer

twisting in labor

then spent

you alone

bear on your body’s hidden cord

the God-given twinned jewels

of death and birth.

Child

child

in the whirlwind of departure

pushing your toes’ white flaming foam

against the burning ring of the horizon

seeking death’s secret way out.

Already voiceless—exhaling smoke—

Lying as the sea lies

with just depth below

tearing at the mooring

with waves of longing.

Child

child

your head buried now

the seedpod of your dreams

grown heavy

in final surrender

ready to sow other land.

With eyes

turned back toward the motherground—

You, cradled in the century’s rut

where time with ruffled wings

drowns, stunned

in the great flood

of your end

without end.

But maybe

in a smokecloud of error

we have

created a wandering cosmos

with the language of our breath—

Have we

time and again

sounded the fanfare

of the beginning

shaped the grain of sand

quick as wind

before, once more, there was light

above the bud of the embryo?

And again

we are encircled

in your districts, and again

though we don’t recall the night

nor the depths of the sea

with our teeth we bite off

the star-veins of words.

And still we work your field

behind death’s back.

Maybe the detours of man’s fall

are like the secret desertions of meteors

marked in the alphabet of storms

alongside rainbows—

And who knows

the course of becoming fertile

how seeds bend up

out of depleted soil

for the suckling mouths

of light.

Those driven

from home

wind-whipped

with the death-vein behind the ear

slaughtering the sun—

Cast off from lost customs

following the watercourse

and the weeping rails of death

they still hold

in the cave

of the mouth

a word hidden

for fear of thieves

they say: rosemary

and chew a root

pulled from the field

taste night after night: departure

they say:

It’s time

as a new wound opened

on the foot.

Their body will be devoured

by the salt of torment.

Skinless

eyeless

did Job form God.

If someone comes

from afar

with a language

that maybe seals off

its sounds

with a mare’s whinny

the chirping

of young blackbirds

like a gnashing saw that chews up

everything in reach—

If someone comes

from afar

moving like a dog

maybe a rat

and it’s winter

dress him warmly

for who knows

his feet may be on fire

(perhaps he rode in

on a meteor)

so don’t scold him

if your rug, riddled with holes,

screams—

A stranger always has

his homeland in his arms

like an orphan

for whom he may be seeking nothing

but a grave.

How many homelands

play cards in the air

as the refugee passes through the mystery

How much sleeping music

in the wooded thicket

where the wind, all alone

plays the midwife.

Lightning-split

the alphabet-spurgewood

sows

in devouring conception

God’s first word.

Fate twitches

in the bloodcoursing meridians of a hand—

Everything is endless

and hung on the rays

of a distance.

O that one understands so little

as long as the eyes know only evening.

Windows and doors open as if knocked off track

before you ready for departure.

Unrest inflames

hiding places for night moths

beginning to pray for home.

Until at length your heart

dreadful hooked wound

was torn into healing,

heaven and earth

as cinders kissing in your gaze—

O Soul—forgive

my wanting to lead you back

to so many hearths of rest

Rest

which is only a dead oasis-word—

Translated from the German with Linda B. Parshall

Notes:

Excerpted from Flight and Metamorphosis (Flucht und Verwandlung) by Nelly Sachs, translated by Joshua Weiner, to be published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translation copyright © 2020 by Joshua Weiner. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (April 2020)

Flight and Metamorphosis

All Words Refugees