A Winter Night

   By Georg Trakl

It has been snowing. Past midnight, drunk on purple wine, you leave the gloomy shelters of men, and the red fire of their fireplaces. Oh the darkness of night.
Black frost. The ground is hard, the air has a bitter taste. Your stars make unlucky figures.
With a stiff walk, you tramp along the railroad embankment with huge eyes, like a soldier charging a dark machinegun nest. Onward!
Bitter snow and moon.
A red wolf, that an angel is strangling. Your trouser legs rustle, as you walk, like blue ice, and a smile full of suffering and pride petrifies your face, and your forehead is white before the ripe desire of the frost;
or else it bends down silently over the doze of the night watchman, slumped down in his wooden shack.
Frost and smoke. A white shirt of stars burns on your clothed shoulders, and the hawk of God strips flesh out of your hard heart.
Oh the stony hill. The cool body, forgotten and silent, is melting away in the silver snow.
Sleep is black. For a long time the ear follows the motion of the stars deep down in the ice.
When you woke, the churchbells were ringing in the town. Out of the door in the east the rose-colored day walked with silver light.