I am the City's Child - Anton Wildgans

I am the City's child. The others frown
and poke their nose at children from the town:
they say we have no home where we belong.
It's true, no forest whispered in our prattle
and all we heard was flagstones rattle -
and yet, beloved city, you're my song.

And every time, when work as an attorney
forced me to leave you for a longer journey,
that it be final was my silent fear.
And always when, returning from my travel
by evening train, I feel that fear unravel
when through the window all your lights appear.

And when, in spring, I lonely stroll for hours,
I feel like drawn by murmurs from the flowers
to walk the suburb, where my school still stands
And when I recognize the old road turning
as once it did, I feel a sacred yearning
that blossoms like a prayer from my hands.

There is the shop that sold me pen and lunch-sack,
my first dividers and my trusty back-pack,
where all the books so new to me I bought.
There is the church that heard my first confession,
where holy sacraments forgave aggression
when in the nearby park with boys I fought.

But then I leave the suburb's cosy darkness
and enter city streets in all their starkness,
where blaring lights in endless sequence loom;
and where, amidst the turbulence and shrillness,
I just remain a small, excluded stillness,
in whom your gardens of contentment bloom.

I am, in all those nameless, surging masses
that fill your streets with bargains and harasses,
the merest point, a dot to you unknown:
I have, in all your motherly expanses -
and like an alien guest of circumstances -
no square of earth that I can call my own.

---

Anton Wildgans (1881 - 1932) Austria
Translated by Walter A. Aue
Source: Poems and their Translations