My Heart at Evening

Toward evening you hear the cry of the bats.
Two black horses bound in the pasture,
The red maple rustles,
The walker along the road sees ahead the small tavern.
Nuts and young wine taste delicious,
Delicious: to stagger drunk into the darkening woods.
Village bells, painful to hear, echo through the black fir branches,
Dew forms on the face.

—Georg Trakl (1887 – 1914)
Translated by James Wright and Robert Bly

Images:
Trakl in the early 1900’s
Self-portrait by Trakl, likely painted in Max von Esterle’s studio, Innsbruck, November 1913