Drops of mercury seem to measure out your life
Elegant perfect spheres falling through the thermometer... drop by drop
You somehow feel that you have seconds left to live
But you don’t want to blame them because they are not guilty
They just don’t know how to ease your pain
They tried to put you together mercury drop by mercury drop
But it was pointless and you were left alone to survive the last few moments
Just a few… in a lovely but pitiless world
You gave them your messages in elegant crystal beakers
Yet trapped in a thermometer your temperature registered fever
That is still coloring your pale cheek
You caught the songs of summer from fairies’ vales
You enclosed your warm trembling soul between the petals of violets…
And all along you longed for wings… golden, beautiful, light wings…
Feathered with the dust of angels’ dreams and ageless legends
Wrapped in the crystalline freshness of summer rain…
But perhaps you didn’t realize you already had them
There crisscrossed behind your thin shoulder blades
They were there but you dared not lift them
As you stood facing the wide wide world…
You saw so many angels flying home…
One by one they left the windowsills of nearby houses
They flew together swiftly to a sunlit place
A place you liked to call the vale of soul-making
You watched them and your eyes glistened with delight
But a painful feeling gave way to a lurking fear
The fear that you had a few hours left to live
Your final hours trapped inside an hourglass
Your thin frame shriveled caught in a fierce struggle for life
Plagued by the merciless burning of your fever
You felt your life’s blood ebbing away and all at once you knew
Never again would you be comforted like you once were
Not by the soul-awakening song of the nightingale
And not even by the quiet whispers of elfin spring
Not by the dance of fairies to the hum of fireflies
Not by the sweet promises of love’s warm bliss
You understood and in bitterness tried to accept it
As poisonous drops of mercury cut off your life
You tried to follow your soul’s flight to the valley glades
But your soft dreams ended lost on their way to fairies’ vales
And yet you ached for life and loved it with every fiber of your being
You longed for angels’ choirs and grasshoppers’ chirps in summer twilight
For beauty and truth in epic wonders and the tender bloom of violets
You longed for hushed moments of bliss in midnight stillness
But you knew that your lifeline had already been cut off
You could only bless the lovely long hour we usually call life
And wait for the end when the fairies will finally pick up your soul
And carry it away while your quiet breath blends with the fairy dust
Wrapped in beauty and truth your soul will rest in peace and endless joy
You will see fairies’ dreams and angels’ banquets in full glory
Very soon you will behold Psyche crowned with the immortals
Soon after will you join the blissful feast of many kindred souls
At long last will your own soul be freed from earthly pain
With a full heart will you sing summer songs with skylarks and nightingales
And watch in tender joy how angels fly and strum their golden harps
Or play with zephyrs in fairy lands on enchanted summer nights
Drops of mercury have long measured out your life
Rains have passed in the midst of innumerable shadows
And yet you are among us sitting at our tables
In the wake of our troubles and passionate joys
You are among us walking in our forests
And listening to yesterday’s tales and today’s wonders
We feel that you are with us although you have long gone away
Long departed down a mossy path to follow your runaway soul
Your lovely soul wrapped in light and freed forever from mortal pain…