In caves emptied of their workers, turning
From spent mines to the ruins of factories,
The soul sleeps under the hive of earth.
Freed for an hour from its deadly dreams
Of Good and Evil, from the fiery judge
Who walks like an angel through the guilty state
The world sets up within the laboring breast,
It falls past Heaven into Paradise:
Here man spins his last Eden like a worm.
Here is Knowledge, the bombs tempt fruitlessly.
In the darkness under the fiery missions
That fail, and are renewed by every season,
He is estranged from suffering, and willingly
Floats like a moon above the starving limbs
Oppressed with remembrance, tossed uncertainly
Under the angels’ deadly paths the strongest
Stammers, “My burden is more than I can bear.”
He knows neither good nor evil, nor the angels,
Nor their message: There is no justice, man, but death.
He watches the child and the cat and the soldier dying,
Not loving or hating their judges, who neither love nor hate;
In his heart Hamburg is no longer a city,
There is no more state.
The judges come to judge man in the night.
How bitterly they look on his desire!
Here at midnight there is no darkness,
At day no light.
The air is smoke and the earth ashes
Where he was fire;
He looks from his grave for life, and judgment
Rides over his city like a star.
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