24

Shall we renounce our age-old friendship,

the great undemanding gods, because the hard

steel we raised so fiercely doesn’t know them?

Or shall we suddenly search for them on a map?

These potent friends who take the dead from us

nowhere brush against our wheels. We’ve

moved our baths and banquet places far away,

and their messengers, long too slow for us,

we forever outstrip. More alone now, wholly

dependent on each other, strangers to each other,

we no longer plot beautiful meandering roads

but remorseless thoroughfares. Only in steam boilers

do the old fires burn, driving pistons, ever more gigantic.

While we feel our strength ebb, like swimmers.