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We lay out our own dark end,
guilt, and the happiness of guilt.

Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
sweet yeast for the yellow dust?

It’s dark now, the horses have had their half-apple,
mist and rain,
Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow.

Tell me again, Lord, how easy it all is—
renounce this,
Renounce that, and all is a shining—
Tell me again, I’m still here,
your quick-lipped and malleable boy.

I have been born on this earth for nothing else except to bear witness,
tied down by my weight, my heaviness, and my lightness.

Jiří Orten is one of the key Czech poets of the twentieth century. He belongs with his brilliant predecessors...