The Demons of the Cities

19 Jul 2005

By German poet, Georg Heym, written at some point in the early 20^th century (or maybe very late 19^th C.), that doesn’t appear to be anywhere online (despite being on several university reading lists).

The midnight cities cower underfoot;
The demons trample through the urban graves;
Their skipper-beards, a sprout of smoke and soot,
Bristle like chins of Charons needing shaves.

Creeping on fog-shoes where the pavement drowses
And crawling forward slowly room by room,
Their shadows waver over waves of houses
And gobble street-lights in the black gulps of gloom.

Their knees are kneeling on the city towers,
Their feet make footstools of the city squares,
And where the rain strews down its bleakest flowers
Their stormy pipe of Pan rears up and blares.

Around their feet each city’s dark refrain
Is circling like a rondo of the waters.
An ode to death. Now faint, now shrill again,
The dirge ebbs into darkness till it falters.

The stream they stroll on is a snaky glow,
Its dim back speckled by the yellow glimmer
The lanterns – blanketed in the black-out – throw.
The melancholy reptile wallows.

Their weight falls heavy on a bridge’s railing
Each time their hands fall heavy into swarms
Of urban flesh, as if some faun were flailing
Across a slimy swamp his outstretched arms.

Now one stands up. He hangs a ghoul’s black mask
On the white moon. The leaden heavens spill
Down darkly from a heaven darker still,
Crushing the houses in a jet-black cask.

A snapping sound. A city’s backbone splits.
A roof cracks open, reddening its rent
With arson. Demons squat on it like cats
And ululate into the firmament.

A spawning mother bawls where midnight billows;
The steep crescendo of each labour pang
Arches her brawny pelvis from its pillows;
Around her the enormous devils throng.
She’s tossed yet anchored. Overhead, her bed’s
Whole ceiling shakes with howlings of the tortured.
Red furrow – redder; longer. Now the orchard
Brings forth the fruit. It rips her womb to shreds.

The devil’s necks are growing like giraffes’.
The baby has no head. The mother lugs
It with her till she faints; a devil laughs;
Her spine is tickled by cold thumbs of frogs.

Tossing their horns, the demons grow so tall
They gash the very sky for blood to plunder.
Through laps of cities roars their earthquake-thunder
While lightning sizzles where their hoofbeats fall.

Another version reads thus:

They wander through the cities night enshrouds:
The cities cower, black, beneath their feet.
Upon their chins like sailors’ beards the clouds
Are black with curling smoke and sooty sleet.

On seas of houses their long shadow sways
And snuffs ranked street-lamps out, as with a blow.
Upon the pavement, thick as fog, it weighs,
And gropes from house to house, solid and slow.

With one foot planted on a city square,
The other knee upon a tower, they stand,
And where the black rain falls they rear, with blare
Of quickened Pan’s-pipes in a cloud-stormed land.

About their feet circles a ritornelle
With the sad music of the city’s sea,
Like a great burying-song. The shrill tones swell
And rumble in the darkness, changefully.

They wander to the stream that, dark and wide,
As a bright reptile with gold-spotted back,
Turns in the lanterned dark from side to side
In its sad dance, while heaven’s stare is black.

They lean upon the bridge, darkly agog,
And thrust their hands among the crowds that pass,
Like fauns who perch above a meadow bog
And plunge lean arms into the miry mass.

Now one stands up. He hangs a mask of gloom
Upon the white-cheeked moon. The night, like lead
From the dun heavens, settles as a doom
On houses into pitted darkness fled.

The shoulders of the cities crack. A gleam
Of fire from a roof burst open flies
Into the air. Big-boned, on the top beam
They sit and scream like cats against the skies.

A little room with glimmering shadows billows
Where one in labor shrieks her agony.
Her body lifts gigantic from the pillows.
And the huge devils stand about to see.

She clutches, shaking, at her torture-bed.
With her long shuddering cry the chamber heaves.
Now the fruit comes. Her womb gapes long and red,
And bleeding, for the child’s last passage cleaves.

The devils’ necks grow like giraffes’. The child
Is born without a head. The mother moans
And holds it. On her back, clammy and wild,
The frog-fingers of fear play, as she swoons.

But vast as giants now the demons loom.
Their horns in fury gore the bleeding skies.
An earthquake thunders in the cities’ womb
About their hooves, where flint-struck fires rise.