eskil_douglas

LEARN TO BE SILENT

Each night on earth is full of pain.
Heart, learn to be silent.
The hard souls, hard shields
reflect light from the home of the stars.

Your lament makes you weaker.
Heart, learn to be silent.
Only silence heals, silence hardens,
untouchedly chaste and guiltlessly true.

You seek suffering's ardent life!
Heart, learn to be silent.
By wounds and fever no one is made strong.
Bright as steel is heaven's stronghold.

YOU SHALL THANK

You shall thank your gods,
if they force you to go
where you have no footprints
to trust to.

You shall thank your gods,
if all shame on you they pin.
You must seek refuge
a little further in.

What the whole world condemns
sometimes manages quite well.
Outlaws were many
who gained their own soul.

He who is forced to wild wood
looks on all with new sight,
and he tastes with gratitude
life's bread and salt.

You shall thank your gods,
when your shell they break.
Reality and kernel
the sole choice you can make.

PRIDE

CHORUS
How could you exist without us,
you great, slow one.
Where had you space to rise up from,
if not in our pride begun.
Your shelter and your rock-grave
are here our hands, tight-wrenched.
And hear, we pray, though not for mercy,
with teeth together clenched:
I can manage.

Around us clinging tough and blind
are lives, swarming and riven.
To man alone, highest and lowest,
was empty despair given.
That made most wondrously
has much too easy to blast.
Oh, bless our pride,
that holds to the last:
I can manage.

What had we else, that would endure
in lifeless wastes
and solace dare itself create
from unreal mists -
from chaos compel form
born of burning homelessness,
give tones to tears and words to screams
and save itself in this:
I can manage.

Here weighs a scale to give justice
to life and death.
How heavy it hangs, the cup of pain,
with our mutilated fates.
How light the other, with what is worth
our aspiration's call.
Put our holy pride in it, O Lord,
then gently it will fall.
I can manage.

[[Same author and translator as last time]]