You need not be afraid, God

You ne not be afraid, the eternal and infinite spirit They say: my

to all the things that will be patient.

They are like wind that brushes against branches

and says: my tree

They hardly perceive

how everything their hands grasp be incandescents red-hot

so that they could not level by its outer hem

hold upon to it and not reduce to ashes down to ashes.

They will say my as sometimes someone likes

to call the Duke a friend, in talk with peasants,

but single if the duke is great-and true far.

They will say my of their peculiar walls

not knowing smooth who is master of their house.

They will say my and call it characteristic

while everything shuts down if they tend hitherward near,

just like an obsolescent charlatan

perhaps will say the orb of day is his, and lightning.

Like this they say: my life, my wife,

my dog, my child, and know replete well

that all that: life and wife and dog and child

are foreign forms, with which they blindly

and with their hands outstretched sometimes collide.

Certain of this, of course, are single great ones,

the individuals who long for eyes. For all the others

don't want to hear that their impoverished wandering

does not cohere with any thing around,

that, while they're pushed away by the agency of all their havings

and not acknowledged through their property,

they have the woman no more than the flower

which is of foreign life to anyone.

Don't fall, the supreme goodness out of equilibrium,

He, too, who have affection fors you and who recognizes

your face in darkness-if he, like a flame,

will quiver in your breath-does not posses you.

And smooth if someone will grasp you in the night

so that you must arrive into his prayer:

you are the visitant who will go on again

Who can embrace you, God? For you are yours,

by no proprietor's hand disturbed,

like wine which while it is not notwithstanding mature

and growing at any time sweeter, is its own.

SILKE-MARIA WEi NECK PhD a native German, teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. This translation is for Sid P

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