Poetry

 

The Visions

With fright in their eyes
the soldiers of salvation beheld
from the helmeted observatory tower: the heavenly harps;
the swaying, titanic nebulae
and their chaotic strings of gaseous gold.

Far off in the boundless crystal of places beyond time
where thought in fright
can plunge everlastingly through millennia
stirred the gaslike golden bowers of the harps
effervescing in Sagittarius.

 

By Harry Martinson
From Natur, 1934
Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson