Poem: April 19

Sleep, by Georg Trakl

Sleep

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDamn you dark poisons,
White sleep!
This highly peculiar garden
Of dusky trees,
Filled with serpents, nightmoths,
Spiders, bats.
Stranger! Your lost shadow
In the sunset,
Adark corsair
On the salt-seas of affliction.
White birds flap up against the seam of night
Over toppling cities
Of steel.

Translation from the German by Robert Firmage