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“Flowers, Too” by Hermann Hesse 🇩🇪🇨🇭 (2 Jul 18779 Aug 1962)
Translated from the German by James Wright
Flowers, too, suffer death,
And yet they are guiltless.
So, too, our own being is pure
And suffers only grief,
Where we ourselves do not wish to understand.
What we call guilt
Is absorbed by the sun,
It comes to meet us out of the pure throats
Of flowers, fragrance and the moving gaze of children.
And as flowers die, So we die, too,
Only the death of deliverance,
Only the death of rebirth.