“THE LAST SPELL TO BE CAST”

Already did I repeat the ancient spell,
And the great Goddess to my sight denied herself.
Already did I repeat, in pauses of the full wind,
The prayers whose soul is a fertile being.
Nothing did the abyss give me nor the sky reveal.
Only the wind returns to where I am one and alone.
And all lies sleeping in the confounded world.

Once my gift could conjour the burning bush
And my call would evoke from the earth
Concentrated presences of those which sleep
Scattered within the natural forms of things.
Once my voice would bring events to pass.
Fairies and elves, were I to call, would come,
And the leaves of the forest were all aglow.

My wand, with which I could at will
Speak unto the existences of beings,
No longer ackowledges my reality.
Now, if I trace the circle, there is nothing there.
The wind now a stranger murmurs distant woes,
And in the moonlight rising by yonder thickets
I am nothing more than the woods or the road.
The gift for which they loved me is now fading.
I can no longer become the form or aim in life
For all those who, searching for them, sought me.
Now a beach, the sea drowns me not in its arms.
Nor do I see myself raised up to greet the sun,
Nor, lost in magical ecstasy,
In the moonlight, at the deep cavern's mouth.

Now the sacred infernal powers,
Which, slumbering without gods or destiny,
Are equal to the substance of things,
Do not head my voice or their names.
The music has departed from my hymn.
No longer is my celestial fury divine
Nor is my body in thoughts still a god.

And the far off deities of the dark pool,
Whom many a time, pale-faced, I have evoked
With the fury of love in abandon,
Today unsummoned they stand before me.
Just as, with no need to love them, I called them,
Now not loving them, do I hold them, and I know
That they will consume my bartered being.

Yet you, oh Sun, whose gold was in my grasp,
You, Moon, whose silver I could convert,
If you can no longer give me that beauty
That times so often I held to be loved,
At least my finite being I have divided,
Let my essential being lose itself within itself,
Only my body without me remain soul and being!

Let my final piece of magic convert me
Into a statue of myself in a living body!
Let who I am die, but who made me and existed,
Anonymous presence to be kissed,
Flesh of my abstract captive love,
Be the death of me in which I may live again;
And such as I was, being but nothing, let me be!

Translation by Mike Harland © 2001