Tag: tenderness

cryptomnesia:

In the end what can I do with you—tenderness
tenderness for birds and for people for a stone
you should sleep in a palm in the eye’s depths
that’s your place may you be woken by no one

You spoil everything you get it back to front
you contract a tragedy into a pocket romance
you change the high-toned flight of a thought
into sobbing and exclamations into moaning

To describe is to murder because it’s your role
to sit in the darkness of a cold and empty hall
to sit solitary where reason blithely rattles on
with mist in a marble eye tears running down

Tenderness, Zbigniew Herbert.

translation Alissa Valles.