The Evening

   By Georg Trakl

With the ghostly shapes of dead heroes
Moon, you fill
The growing silence of the forest,
Sickle-moon—
With the gentle embraces
Of lovers,
And with ghosts of famous ages
All around the crumbling rocks;
The moon shines with such blue light
Upon the city,
Where a decaying generation
Lives, cold and evil—
A dark future prepared
For the pale grandchild.
You shadows swallowed by the moon
Sighing upward in the empty goblet
Of the mountain lake.