Georg Heym: Why do you come, white moths…

Why do you come, white moths, so oft to me?
Souls of the dead, why do you flutter so oft
Upon my hand; your wingbeat often
Leaves then a tiny trace of ashes. 

You who are dwelling near urns, in a place where dreams repose
Stooped in eternal shade, in the dim expanse
As on the vaults of tombs the bats
That nightly whir away in a tumult.

I oft hear in my sleep the vampires' yaps;
They sound as if the somber moon were laughing.
And I see deep in empty caverns
The candles of the homeless shadows.

What is all life? The brief flare-up of torchlights
Ringed by distorted frights out of black darkness
And some of them come close already
And with thin hands reach for the flames.

What is all life? Small vessel in abysses

Of sea forgotten. Dreadful rigid skies.
Or as at night across bare fields lost moonlight
Meanders till it disappears.

Woe unto him who once saw someone dying,
When in the calmness of cool autumn death
Unseen stepped up to the sick one's moist bed
And bade him pass away, while like the whistling

And rattling of a rusty organ pipe
His throat exhaled its last breath with a wheeze.
Woe to such witnesses. They bear forever
The pallid flower of a leaden horror.

Who will unlock the lands beyond our death
And who the gate of the gigantic rune.
What do the dying see that makes them roll
The blind white of their eyes so terribly.

It starts as an animal poem, at least. Heym (1887-1912) was a rebel of blinding foresight and intensity (he seems to have been bipolar, but maybe that’s reductionist). This poem was published posthumously from an uncompleted draft, which among other things crossed out the first two lines of the sixth stanza ("Woe unto him...). Tr. Reinhold Grimm; I suspect the Christopher Middleton translation will be better, but I don't have it.