‘Out of Darkness

Out of darkness I come, a woman.
I carry a child, and have forgotten whose it is;
Once I knew.
But now there is no longer any man for me...
Behind me all of them have disappeared like rivulets
The earth drank dry.
And on I go and on.
Before the day I must be in the mountains, and already constellations fade.

Out of darkness I come.
Through shadowed streets I walked alone,
Then sudden, lunging light with talons ripped soft blackness,
As a panther fells a doe,
And a door flung wide spat ugly screams, demented howling, beastly cries.
And men rolled drunken in the street.
I shook them from my skirt as I walked past.

And then I crossed the empty marketplace.
Leaves swam in puddles where he moon was shining.
Emaciated, greedy dogs sniffed garbage on the stones.
Fruits rotted squashed;
An old man dressed in rags still bowed his poor, tormented strings
And raised his thin, discordant, mournful voice
Unheard.
Those fruits had once grown ripe in sun and dew,
In happy fragrant dreams of loving blooms,
But the whimpering beggar
Had long ago forgotten this, and thought of nothing but his hunger and his thirst.

Before the palace of the mighty I stood still,
And when I trod upon the lowest step
The flesh-red porphyry burst cracking underneath my sole.--
I turned
And gazed aloft to barren windows, to the midnight candle of the thinker,
Who pondered, pondered, but could not invent redemption from his doubt,
And to the muffled lamp within the sickroom, where the patient would not learn
How he should die.
Beneath the bridge
Two horrid skeletons disputed gold.
I raised the gray shield of my poverty before my face
And passed them by unharmed.

Now, far away, the river whispers to its banks.

And now I stumble forward on the stony, stubborn path.
Jumbled rocks and thistles wound my groping hands:
A cave awaits me
That conceals inside its deepest crack the bronze-green, namelesss raven.
I will enter
And crouch down to rest beneath the sheltering shadows of his giant wings,
And listen, drowsing, to the silent, growing word my child speaks,
And sleep, my brow turned eastward,
‘Til the dawn.’

--Gertrud Kolmar, Dark Soliloquy