Sunday, January 22, 2012

Gunnar Ekelöf via Edward Field

The World Is Every One

The world of everyday is populated
by the unknowing in unconscious rebellion
against their ‘I’, an oppressive god.
 
In every being a thousand captive beings,
in the world of each a thousand worlds
where all are also sleeping, all in a dreamworld
live, unaware, one no realer than the one I am in.  
And we, masters of our thousand possibilities
are under other masters -- captive
of celebrities, rulers, gods, whose nature
we can no more know than we know
ourselves.  And what we call our feelings
merely reflect the colorful, perhaps fictitious,
lives they lead.
 
But when something occurs –
a great liner steaming across the horizon,
gleaming in the sunset – unseen
until the ripples from her wake wash up on the beach,
and the waters seething on the shore reveal to us 
that others have embarked on a journey to…to where?...,
we too are troubled by a sudden yearning
and for a moment, some of us awaken.

trans. Edward Field

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