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.

Matt Howard: Wasp Nest in a Bowler Hat

My Queen, Governors and fellow drones,

on this most arid of mornings

our new city hums in hexagonal cells. This very day,

the manufacture of paper increases exponentially.

Our vaults, and each of us, are filled with common purpose.

All futures are of course larval and we know 

incidence of sting can go up or down,

yet we still promise always to pay the bearer in full.

Let this be the year of wasps, high summer

sustainable with the endless ooze of sugars;

the entitlement of wasps. Buzz with risk.

Go now, take your commission: al fresco breakfasts

of pastries and jam, then golden picnic afternoons.

Levy ice cream from the lip of every man, woman and child.

Published 2016. Very funny - to be recited aloud, but by a trained actor rather than by any old poet.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle): Birds in Snow

See
how they trace,
across the very-marble
of this place,
bright sevens and printed fours,
elevens and careful eights,
abracadabra
of a mystic's lore
or symbol
outlined
on a wizard's gate.
Like plaques of ancient writ
our garden flags now name
the great and very-great;
our garden flags acclaim
in carven hieroglyph,
here king and kinglet lie,
here prince and lady rest,
mythical queens sleep here
and heroes that are slain
in holy righteous war.
Hieratic, slim and fair,
the tracery written here
proclaims what's left unsaid
in Egypt of her dead.

Published 1928. I find a little of the archaic projections conjured up by Pound and his acolytes like H.D. goes a long way, but this has some brief moments of beauty. Very-marble is an old term for the purest of marble, and by analogy "very-great" must denote the most refined greatness.

Hagiwara Sakutarō: Tortoise

A grove,

A swamp,

And an azure sky:

Weighing ponderously upon one's hand

A pure-gold tortoise quietly sleeps . . .

This bright unhappy Heaven-and-Earth

He bears in pain,

And probingly sinks through one's soul . . .

The tortoise sinks in the deep azure sky.

Tr. Takomichi Ninomiya & D.J. Enright. A beautiful image that trembles on the border between clarity and mystery. Hagiwara (1886-1942) seems like a combination of German Expressionist and Buddhist, or perhaps a Buddhist maudit.