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.