—

You can’t hurt the pain.
Can’t make the grief suffer the way you do.
Nor cut a lifeless branch on a weak familiar tree,
Regardless of the shades unrolling over you,
From every last year’s leaf the spring will not renew.
You won’t kill what’s dead already,
Loathe what’s cold or vanished,
What no more will shine.
Even when the old flame surrounds you.

You do not heal,
But never grows the fatal wound,
Wishing you’d turn the stroke of fate
In a violent revenging blow.
By then you point the fist
Against your own shadow,
Unveil a clear target
For those of light beliefs,
Who hardly bare their chest,
And let their feelings go.
You look for mind relief,
In the balance we make
Between beauty and dirt.
Not amongst right or wrong,
Justice and crime.

You’re not the lawyer.
Because you feel, more than you judge.
You get to sense, more than you deem.

Then in the final repentence,
Here is the greatest of your deeds ;
If, as a living remembrance,
You are the one she requested
For the ultimate confidence,
Facing an almost departed.
The hand in debt will cure
What itself had branded.
And you will know the touch,
As you will know your pain,
But then also the prints
From a brotherly chain.
This major human link
Was never born in vain.

So you will have to lend
Your own uncertain hand,
All over bitterness,
Absence and loneliness.
Wide open for a mate
Not to a broken fate,
Not to a shred of history,
Nor a fallen memory.
Not to a leaving rest of life.

For you cannot hurt the pain.
She’ll lift you anyway.

And you shall forgive.

—

(Tableau : Edvard Munch – « Vampyr II »)