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