67 Quotes by Paul Celan

You Were My Death You were my death:you I could hold when all fell away from me.

I Hear that the Axe has Flowered I hear that the axe has flowered,I hear that the place can't be named,I hear that the bread which looks at himheals the hanged man,the bread baked for him by his wife,I hear that they call lifeour only refuge.

A Leaf, TreelessA LEAF, treelessfor Bertolt Brecht:What times are thesewhen a coversation is almost a crimebecause it includesso much made explicit?

HomecomingSnowfall, denser and denser,dove-coloured as yesterday,snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.White, stacked into distance.Above it, endless,the sleigh track of the lost.Below, hidden,presses upwhat so hurts the eyes,hill upon hill,invisible.On each,fetched home into its today,an I slipped away into dumbness:wooden, a post.There: a feeling,blown across by the ice windattaching its dove- its snow-coloured cloth as a flag.

Wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel als Abgrund unter sich.

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

Ein Nichtswaren wir, sind wir, werdenwir bleiben, blühend.die Nichts-, dieNiemandsrose.

Your hair waves once more when I weep. With the blue of your eyesyou lay the table of love: a bed between summer and autumn.We drink what somebody brewed, neither I nor you nor a third:we lap up some empty and last thing.We watch ourselves in the deep sea’s mirrors and faster pass food to the other:the night is the night, it begins with the morning,beside you it lays me down.("The Years From You To Me")