Dèr Mouw on the subject of pain

God’s said to make the soul divine through pain?

None but a fool or mocker might so think:

who uses night to bleach what’s black as ink,

the impure with sticky pitch makes white again?

No, pain ennobles no one: pain turns hard.

A stinking dung-fly I became that feeds

on filth and muck, that mockingly misreads,

defiles what’s finest in the human heart.

My yearning eyes hunt misery as food,

prey hungrily on every face they see

where painful laugh is grimly etched for good

and I think eagerly: ‘Not only me!’

And, flesh-fly now, pain pierces me, for I

could just as well have been a butterfly.