Grief
In the cemetery hyacinths and tulips are in
flower
– hyacinths cool and gleaming in the shade by
the dark-green cypress, tulips flaming like
open
red hearts up from the naked soil. It is
spring, people die every day, and with each
passing
evening the scent grows stronger and stronger
from the
many new clusters of flowers.
All
this ostentatious grief, how coarse! How loud-
mouthed!
– There
lies a grave at the very outermost
edge of the cemetery, all on its own in the
stony
ground. It is scarcely a grave, there is no beautifully
shaped mound over it, it is quite simply a
hollow and nothing else; – with earth and tussocks
tossed haphazardly and hastily around
it. No wreaths lie on the grave, all that
marks it
is a simple, crude batten, a strip of wood
with a
wrongly spelt name cut into it with a knife:
ELEN
I
walk out there in the evenings, and my heart
feels humble at the sight of this lonely grave
lying
there as if on sufferance, with no intention
to appeal
to the sympathy of one living, so far removed
from
the clamorous grief of the wealthy...
It
is like a poem to me, that grave.
A symbol of quiet grief, so movingly simple as
grief is – grief that only wishes to hide far
away from everyone, be spared all well-meaning
words, die in silence far far away in the farthest
corner of the wood like a mortally wounded
animal.
Perhaps there is no one except me in the whole
wide
world who thinks of this grave; nobody ever
comes here...
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