Huub de Lange - Symphony of Light and Shadow - текст песни (слова)

Part 2: Light and Shadow
 
 My mother bore me in the southern wild,
 And I am black, but oh! my soul is white.
 White as an angel is the English child,
 But I am black as if bereaved of light.
 
 My mother taught me underneath a tree,
 And, sitting down before the heat of day,
 She took me on her lap and kissed me,
 And pointing to the east began to say:
 
 "Look on the rising sun, -there God does live
 And gives his light, and gives his heat away;
 And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
 Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
 
 And we are put on earth a little space
 That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
 And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
 Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
 
 For when our souls have learned the heat to bear
 The cloud will vanish, we shall hear his voice
 Saying: 'Come out from the grove, my love and care,
 And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice!' "
 
 Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
 And thus I say to little English boy:
 When I from black and he from white cloud free,
 And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
 
 I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
 To lean in joy upon our father's knee;
 And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
 And be like him, and he will then love me.
 
 
 Part 3: The Beautiful Changes
 
 One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
 The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
 On water; it glides
 So from the walker, it turns
 Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
 Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
 
 The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
 By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
 As a mantis, arranged
 On a green leaf, grows
 Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
 Any greenness is greener than anyone knows.
 
 Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
 They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
 In such kind ways,
 Wishing ever to sunder
 Things and Thing's selves for a second finding, to lose
 For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
 
 
 Part 6: The Dark Tarn
 
 Slipping my self
 As a bather strips his clothes
 Nightly I plunge
 Into the dark tarn, the lone,
 Ebon, glassy, deep,
 Sunk beneath cliffs of sleep.
 
 I stumble to it drowsily
 Up mazy slopes of dream,
 Then plunge, plunge and am
 Lost, immersed, drowned,
 Beyond reach of sight or sound,
 Of consciousness my spark
 Dowsed, douted, quenched in the dark.
 
 Slowly emergent
 To the cheerful light,
 The sunstream from on high,
 This not-I, once more I,
 Day's traffickings, day's loves,
 Resumes with sense and sight.
 
 But some day, ah, some day,
 As yet outwith my ken
 I shall sink to unplumbed deeps
 Beyond dredging net of men,
 From that underwater world of timeless sleep
 Never to rise,
 Never to rise to upper day again.
 
 
 Part 7: Indra
 
 Down to the sand-covered earth. 
 Straw from the harvested fields soiled our feet; 
 Dust from the high-roads, 
 Smoke from the cities, 
 Foul-smelling breaths, 
 Fumes from cellars and kitchens, 
 All we endured. 
 Then to the open sea we fled, 
 Filling our lungs with air, 
 Shaking our wings, 
 And laving our feet. 
 
 Indra, Lord of the Heavens, 
 Hear us! 
 Hear our sighing! 
 Unclean is the earth; 
 Evil is life; 
 Neither good nor bad 
 Can men be deemed. 
 As they can, they live, 
 One day at a time. 
 Sons of dust, through dust they journey; 
 Born out of dust, to dust they return. 
 Given they were, for trudging, 
 Feet, not wings for flying. 
 Dusty they grow-- 
 Lies the fault then with them, 
 Or with Thee?
 
 
 Part 8: Painting of a Communion
 
 In the Church of my fathers
 The table is spread only twice in the year,
 In May and November. With each recurring season,
 High springtide, the onset of winter,
 As I sit and partake, I look at the patient faces,
 Row upon row, lined with life's cares, and looking,
 In the clear white light refracted
 From the strips of snowy linen lining the pew-boards,
 Like the faces you see ranged in the Dutchman's paintings,
 Rembrandt, who loved humankind.
 
 
 Part 9: The daylight is dying
 
 The daylight is dying 
 Away in the west, 
 The wild birds are flying 
 in silence to rest; 
 In leafage and frondage 
 Where shadows are deep, 
 They pass to its bondage-- 
 The kingdom of sleep 
 And watched in their sleeping 
 By stars in the height, 
 They rest in your keeping, 
 O wonderful night. 
 When night doth her glories 
 Of starshine unfold, 
 'Tis then that the stories 
 Of bush-land are told. 
 
 Unnumbered I told them 
 In memories bright, 
 But who could unfold them, 
 Or read them aright? 
 Beyond all denials 
 The stars in their glories, 
 The breeze in the myalls, 
 Are part of these stories. 
 
 The waving of grasses, 
 The song of the river 
 That sings as it passes 
 For ever and ever, 
 The hobble-chains' rattle, 
 The calling of birds, 
 The lowing of cattle 
 Must blend with the words. 
 
 Without these, indeed you 
 Would find it ere long, 
 As though I should read you 
 The words of a song 
 That lamely would linger 
 When lacking the rune, 
 The voice of a singer, 
 The lilt of the tune. 
 
 But as one halk-bearing 
 An old-time refrain, 
 With memory clearing, 
 Recalls it again, 
 These tales roughly wrought of 
 The Bush and its ways, 
 May call back a thought of 
 The wandering days; 
 And, blending with each 
 In the memories that throng 
 There haply shall reach 
 You some echo of song.