Against the old oak I cling my cheek
to hear a lost voice inside;
The voice of a lost friend,
the voice of my lost father and mother,
the voice of lost love.
And in this lonely night the voices
inside the old oak are quiet and inaudible,
as if dying along with my spirit.
The night has turned its beautiful lonely face to the sky,
and I,
I call out my own name in this lonely night.
which became perfectly strange to me –
with some desperate hope
that I shall hear the echo of my own spirit.
Wise people say that each spirit is made of memories,
and my memories are dead;
dead like those lost voices inside the old oak,
which, like vampire claws,
raises its old, barren branches towards a black crow,
to steel its voice and to call out into this silent, lonely night,
like the voice of many friends of men,
that someone’s tear sometime dies before it’s born.
Inside me, there is still hope
that someone shall hear my name,
and that it won’t sound as strange
as it does to me.
Slowly and ghastly I tread the shadows
like a sinner treads the skulls in hell,
and I call out with a solitary cry
into this lonely night,
to chase away death, if I can’t chase away solitude.
But what is life worth without voices,
not the ones you can buy,
but voices of conscience,
which are born and eternally live along with human souls.
Against the old oak I cling my cheek,
and I listen in to a thousand souls,
Now I know,
yes, Lord, now I know that someone will call my name as well,
because when you hear the voices of souls
of dear people you’ve lost,
you have the power
to bear memories of yourself in someone else.
©Walter William Safar
