Night Thoughts

 by Brett Rutherford

after Goethe

Ye Stars above, I do not now envy you,
there in the selfsame beauty and glory
as ever on high — the hope of sailors
when hurricane and tempest roaring come,
the one last ask when God and men all fail
their shouted prayers, and when “Stars above!”
leaps up from heart-felt humbleness from one
who sees Polaris in the waterspout’s eye —
And there! And there! Star upon star arrayed
telling in their count and coming how far
the harbor, how near the perilous reef —

No! Stars do not love, and have never loved!
Those whom they save, they save indifferently.
Your circling spheres unvarying tick on,
dragging your plows through Heaven’s black furrows.
You are the same! The same! Yet though you whirl,
in depths beyond the number of zeroes
that are and ever will be inscribed there
in that line that is infinity’s arc
for you, almost-eternal hours have passed,
while I, by love distracted, looked not out
the window, nor up amid my moonless
dark amours, bereft of sense and starless
over two eyes, dark brows and a mere mouth —

All memory of night and of burning stars
forgot! Wind back for me, o starry vault
and fill my bitter thoughts with luminance,
you wise ones who, immortal, do not love,
and I shall trade with you my illusion,
that one for another should be dizzy
and stumble about in one’s own orbit,
imagining some astral collision
that would not be mutually deadly,
dragging along all your friends and neighbors
until the cosmos is a billiards game.

Ye stars then, say that you envy me not!
Say: Men do not love, and have never loved!