English Studies Forum

Last Days Of Georg Trakl

Maggie Jaffe

Three things he loves:

cigarettes dipped in opium,

the black pool of his exquisite poetry

and his own sister, stoned

on laudanum.

Dissolute days in the Gymnasium,

drugged nights without money,

enlists in the Austrian army.

As a pharmacist, Trakl's sent to the

Eastern Front.  Runs out of morphine.

Charged with 90 wounded

men who are carried into a barn.

Above the soldiers' shattered limbs,

the moon explodes.  White

hands gnaw the walls:

wild lament of their broken mouths.*

Help me, help them!  No response.  

After one soldier blows out his brains

with his bolt-action Mauser,

Trakl's nerves are also shot.

Rescued from suicide by his "superiors," 

in the ward, that night, he imbibes

a lethal dose of coke.

* From "Grodek," 1914.