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Childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before 
you try to find words for something so lost, 
for those long childhood afternoons you knew 
that vanished so completely --and why? 

We're still reminded--: sometimes by a rain, 
but we can no longer say what it means; 
life was never again so filled with meeting, 
with reunion and with passing on 

as back then, when nothing happened to us 
except what happens to things and creatures: 
we lived their world as something human, 
and became filled to the brim with figures. 

And became as lonely as a sheperd 
and as overburdened by vast distances, 
and summoned and stirred as from far away, 
and slowly, like a long new thread, 
introduced into that picture-sequence 
where now having to go on bewilders us. 

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