A Stop on the Heath
- - - The naked heath
Which is its own border - -
Grundtvig
Sorrowful, sweeping lies there before us
The sable-brown heath;
A single juniper bush stands out light-green
Amongst all the heather.
Round are strewn hummocks and hills
Which, like a high ridge, run through the landscape.
Though at each slope,
And even each wheel rut
Hard ochre subsoil protrudes.
We seem to be gliding over a planet that lies
Extinct beneath us; a grieving grave;
The full moon though gleams bright in the deep-blue sky
Where the strangely shaped cloud
Glides away as if swimming mountains.
All is so silent!
All that one hears is the carriage wheels scraping
Deep in the sand of the road,
The passengers though sit silent, wrapped in cloaks,
For the wind from the west is keen
Over desolate, sable-brown heath.
Here a house lies –
Alone, in desolate countryside,
Ramshackle, stunted;
Just like a wreck in a motionless sea,
It stands there before us.
In loose night attire
The housewife emerges;
An ugly woman, old and brown;
Her tattered skirt hangs shabbily
Round her pointed, bony thighs.
She quickly lights a fire of dried heather;
See her puffing, the smoke
Swirling jet-black into the air,
And the flame casting its reddish gleam
Onto her thin, wrinkled face.
We set up camp outside the house,
Make our arrak punch and sit there like gods,
Proudly, on the sable-brown, slumbering earth
That sails with the moon in the sky.
After a while the old woman grins and sips
The punch she is given, and talks
Of The Spanish, who were here
During the years of the war;
How the foreign visitors no one understood
Set up camp out here on the heath;
How often they wept like children
And spoke of their homes:
Then danced and pranced on moonlit evenings
And sang their strange native songs,
Far from home, alone,
On the desolate, sable-brown heath. –
Our meal over,
We sit on the carriage once more
And nod a farewell to the crone,
Who ghostlike gapes and nods in return.
But behind the door
A teenage girl peeps curiously out;
Looks at us in amazement, yawns and stretches
Her languorous, lovely limbs,
And the dress she has loosely slung round her
Slips from a well-formed shoulder
Revealing white marble out on the heath.
To see the original poem, go to here
