Mathilde Blind: Verses about Night

I think of thee in watches of the night,
I feel thee near;
Like mystic lamps consumed with too much light
Thine eyes burn clear.

The barriers that divide us in the day
And hide from view,
Like idle cobwebs now are brushed away
Between us two.

I probe the deep recesses of thy mind
Without control,
And in its inmost labyrinth I find
My own lost soul.

No longer like an exile on the earth
I wildly roam,
I was thy double from the hour of birth
And thou my home.

O'er this huge town, rife with intestine wars,
Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines
Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines
Black brows majestical with glimmering stars.
Her dewy silence soothes life's angry jars:
And like a mother's wan white face, who pines
Above her children's turbulent ways, so shines
The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.

Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush
Each other in the fateful strife for breath,
And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush
Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath,
Are swathed within the universal hush,
As life exchanges semblances with death.

THE land lay deluged by the Moon;
The molten silver of the lake
Shimmered in many a broad lagoon
Between grey isles, whose copse and brake
Lay folded on the water's breast
Like halcyons in a floating nest.

And like a child who trusts in God
When in the dark it lies alone,
Stretched on the aromatic sod
My heart was laid against your own,
Against your heart, which seemed to be
Mine own to all Eternity.

Lapped in illimitable light,
The woods and waters seemed to swoon,
And clouds like angels-winged the night
And slipped away into the Moon,
Lost in that radiant flame above
As we were lapped and lost in love.