Beneath mis-hewn willows, where tanned children play
And leaves blow, trumpets sound. A graveyard’s chill.
Banners of scarlet pierce the maple’s sorrow.
Horsemen alongside fields of rye; deserted mills.
Or shepherds sing at night and stags step
Into the grove’s age-old sorrow, the circle of fire-pits.
Dancers rise from a black wall;
Banners of scarlet, laughter, madness, trumpets.
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The year ends magnificent,
With golden wine and garden’s fruit.
All round the forests are wondrously silent,
companions to man on his lonesome route.
Then the farmer says: It is good.
You evening bells, long and soft,
Give the end a cheery mood.
And a flight of birds offers the proper send-off.
It is the calm time of love
In a boat down the blue river
How beautifully one image follows another—
In silence and peace, it all sinks under.
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was a pharmacist in the Austrian Medical Corps and a poet who is now considered
among the principal writers of the Austrian Expressionist movement.
“Despite a short life and a small amount of work, Georg Trakl is one
of the most important representatives of German poetry of the 20th Century.
His main life stages were Salzburg, Vienna, Innsbruck, and finally the war
front in Galicia.”
—Salzburger Kulturvereinigung:
“Brief Bio” + photos
Poetry Foundation offers a bibliography as well as
additional details, e.g.,
“Trakl’s strongest literary affiliation, however, is with the French
symbolists of the nineteenth century, primarily Arthur Rimbaud, whose disordered
and conflict-ridden genius is said to be incarnated in the Austrian poet.”
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is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois where he works in the
fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio
State University.
His nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another
Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles
Review, New Letters, A Public Space, and Subtropics, among others.
Elliott is the author of the fiction collection, From the Crooked Timber
(Press 53, 2011). His poetry collection, The Cartographer’s Ink,
is forthcoming in late 2014 from NYQ Books; and his novel, The Doors You Mark Are
Your Own (co-authored with Raul Clement), is forthcoming in 2015 from Dark
House Press.
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SHJ invites you to visit the sites below for more of Okla Elliott’s work in the world:
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“
...Voice is the driver of this story’s strength, but voice alone is not
enough—unless, as here, the voice’s aloneness is the sharpened
point: here is a character who was once the star, but is now wheeling
through the wings crashing into things....
”
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