It’s fall.
Heavy droplets drip sad and terminal--it seems this rain will be eternal.*
That’s sentimental. There is no fall--for me. I don’t want it. There is heavy labor that I must do to protect, to strengthen my soul.
Heavy labor?** Pretty words. I’m doing nothing. Not heavy labor, not light labor. I am not rising to self-consciousness. My moments are lonely, and without sense. Nothing connects them and no purpose illuminates them. I don’t believe in my goal.*** But I want it, want to believe in it. May my moments be: work and prayer!
God, fate me to believe!
By Moyshe Varshe
Translated by Corbin Allardice
*- This couplet forms a rhyme in Yiddish, “terminal” is added here to reproduce that effect. “Shvere tropn kapn treyerik [troyerik, as said in Varshe’s Litvak pronunciation]--s’dukht, regn vet shoyn eybik.”
**- Here, Varshe uses the word melitse. For more on this, see note to “August 15, 1911.”
***- The words for purpose and goal are the same, tsil.
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