MORITURI
When suicides seek death they never stray far from where thoroughfares and highways lie; that life’s waves may not roll too faraway when they lie down in readiness to die.
Sometimes they leap from bridges into rivers, from crowds into kingdom of dead, you hear their shots amid the city traffic more than in still and fearful solitude.
For thought the ice may chill the spirit’s breath and stifle in it darkness and in grief, it still cries even at the gates of death to be once more torn backwards into life.
And so they always shun the lonely forest where stones alone receive their falling tears and where the soul’s unapprehended sorrows reverberate in laughter and in jeers.
— Georg Heym (1908)
(transl. Antony Hasler)
















