IN THE AIR your root stays on, there
in the air.
Where earthliness clusters, earthy,
Breath-and-Clay.

Looming
up there, the banned, the
burned: a Pomeranian, at home
in the Maybeetle song that stayed motherly, summerly, bright-
blooded on the edge
of all cragged
cold winterhard
syllables.

With him
the meridians wander:
sucked
up by his
sun-steered pain, which bonds these lands after
the noonday speech of a
loving
distance. Every-
where is Here and Today, is a radiance
made of despairs, that
those who've been sundered step into with their
blinded mouths:

a kiss, at night,
brands the sense of a language they waken to, they--:

gone home again to
uncanny anathema
that gathers the dispersed, those
led through the stary-desert soul, the
tentmakers up there in the zone
of their gazings and ships,
the tiny sheaves of hope
with a rush of archangels'wings, of destiny,
the brothers, the sisters, those
found too light, too heavy,
too light on
cosmic scales in their blood-
defiling
fruitful womb, the lifelong aliens
spermatically crowned with stars, heavily
camped in the shoals, the bodies
embanked in swollen heaps, --the

ford-beings, whom
the clubfoot of the gods
comes stumbling over-- by
whose
star time too late?

--Paul Celan, (1963)