It Is Told That Two Diggers...

Time moves on
with its slow, heavy minutes,
dragging behind it the wagons of the nights,
laden with their darkened secrets.
Time moves on, moves on, hauling life along,
and there, upon the carpet of the sands,
where the wagons have left behind
the remnants of the wheel tracks,
we are still here, an adze in every palm,
still digging the earth in desolation and gloom.
We weep here
while time moves on;
we dig the earth, searching for what we lost here,
while time moves on.

•

Alone, alone in silence,
alone and silent, we watch how the veins die
in our hands and in our eyes.
And there, beneath the dust, the living one waits
in sorrow and torment
for a sunrise to appear,
for him to see us at last, with our dimmed eyes,
crossing the abyss
and giving him back his youth —
that living one in the darkness.
Ah, if only the veins in our hands were whole,
that we might give him back his life.

•

Dig on alone now... I can bear no more...

Dig the earth alone. I feel annihilation
filling my palm and filling my arm. I feel hope
fading far away beyond the reach of the bend,
where time passed us by
some centuries ago,
and tomorrow it will pass us by again
and see you digging by yourself in grief and stillness.
It will pass, and you will be digging through the heaps of ice
in the soil, in these veins of mine.

Then a time will come
and warmth will creep into the motionless body,
the body of the man living in his cold grave,
and there beneath the darkness lie two dead ones,
two dead ones whose arms have frozen like the ice,
and stubborn time passes
by them once again
and sees in them two companions
who long dug in the dust,
dug in the fog,
dug on without ceasing;
perhaps they dug in the pallor of autumn
or the scowl of the fearsome winter.
Long were they seen digging,
digging, still digging in yearning —
and now they lie dead upon the soil.

And time moves on,
dragging their remains through the sands,
and it sees the dead-living man folding up the nights,
astray, alone;
no place contains him any longer,
nor any time.
He has lost tomorrow,
and there remain to him yesterday and the two dead ones
... and time went on moving...!