'Little Life'

'You have to know, dear Leo, that the real Cain is not an invention of yours or anyone (and as being Cain he will always resist the creation, he's not like all the invented Cains). But this is the most beautiful thing. He's -let's say- the absolute negation of your astheticism, the eternal motif and your greatest anger.'-K.

Margarete Susman
1.901


Life is so small, death yet so enormous
And thus death
pours her whole counterfeit gifts
Onto mighty enmities in her lap
And seizes herself loosely and weeping blood,
Out of a grave.

Yet, the love in her eternal rainbow
Stretches in blaze through both the living and the dead;
She's got that eternal, unique ribbon
Protracted all through the foreign land.

She follows all the departures, into the vaults down there
And lets herself die away, mumbling and yearning with them, sidewards;
She stays with the abandoned, over the graves
And returning with them, in the dark, walking with a stick
Into the wide world.