Cybele astride the lion Poem by Gerhard Falkner

Stunning
the way one merges into the other
how there a god persists with the head of a bull
and there an arm−still warm
reaches into its armor
while everything else is falling
Stunning how the marble stretches out
its terrain left and right
so that a lion, as if on drugs, rides Cybele (infamous
for her jealous rages
and just, one might say, flown in
from Ephesus)
into the fray
How the fragments
in the marble pauses
thicken into pulses, rhythms
How the fractured members bridge
the gaps between them and the whole
flows into an Olympian orchestra

After all this, this freshness, this strength of youth
it surely would have been better had the old gods
put the people of Today
into a museum.
The only problem:
no one would have gone to visit.

Übertragen von Mark Anderson