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I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.
opening stanza of I got off the train
GOD
At times I’m the god I carry in myself,
And then I’m the god, the believer and the prayer
And the ivory image
In which this god is forgotten.
At times I’m no more than an atheist
Of this god I am when exalted.
I see in myself an entire sky,
And it’s only a vast and hollow sky.
3 June 1913
BY THE MOONLIGHT, IN THE DISTANCE
By the moonlight, in the distance,
A sailboat on the river
Sails peacefully by.
What does it reveal?
I don’t know, but my being
Feels suddenly strange,
And I dream without seeing
The dreams that I have.
What anguish engulfs me?
What love can’t I explain?
It’s the sailboat that passes
In the night that remains.
love the last stanza