The Immortals

Time and again we spot the rising fumes,
Products of high-pressure life on earth;
All its drunken excess, its misery and dearth,
Bloodstained smoke from countless hearty meals
For those condemned to die; fits of carnal lust;
Hands that murder, make money and pray;
Teeming masses, whipped up by fear and greed,
All emitting a rank, stuffy, warm and acrid dust,
The breath of bliss and rampant lechery;
Devouring their own flesh and spitting it out,
Devising future wars and pleasing forms of art,
Painting the brothel red even as it burns,
Gorging, stuffing, whoring their infantile way
Through the gaudy, tawdry fairground array
That’s born afresh for each of them in turn,
But one day will for each to dust return.
Unlike you we’ve found ourselves a home
Up in the starry ether, bright and cold.
Oblivious to the passing hours and days,
We’re neither male nor female, young nor old.
To us your murderous and lecherous ways,
Your fears, your ecstasies and sins
Are merely a show like the circling suns,
And every day is as long as the last.
While you fret and fidget we quietly slumber,
Inhaling the icy cold of outer space,
Or quietly gaze at stars without number
And the heavenly dragon, our friend.
Our life is eternal, cool and unchanging;
Cool and star-bright, our laughter knows no end.

**
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, spasmodic lust;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you evermore residing
In the ether’s star-translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star-bright is our eternal laughter.

from the book Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse