Metempsychosis
Long after all life
Shall have ceased upon the widowed earth,
The sorrowful shades of humankind,
The plaintive souls of humankind,
Will return to visit
The widowed earth
Where all life shall have ceased.
They will leave behind the new bodies
Which the tyrannical right hand of God
Will have assigned to their wandering fate,
Upon some distant planet,
And piously will come to visit
The widowed earth.
Then their spiritual eyes
And their immaterial ears
Will recognize the forms, the colors, and the sounds
That were the works of their diligent hands,
Through the piled-up and forgotten ages.
That were the works of their feeble hands,
Yet hands stronger still
Than the Void.
While within them throbbed the life of earth
And their mouths proclaimed
The thrice-holy name of immortal Art.
And when, come the returning dawn, another sun
Calls them back to the bodies assigned
To their wandering fate,
Upon some distant planet,
Each wandering shade, each plaintive soul
Will say: —I dreamed a wondrous dream.
And, under the lash of eternal Beauty
And of eternal Melancholy,
Humankind will once more subdue—
Upon that distant planet—
The colors, the forms, and the sounds.
Marie Krysinska, 1890