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Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann Read the translator's notes

Know this:

I live beast days. I am a water hour.

At night my eyelids droop like forest and sky.

My love knows few words:

I like it in your blood.

Source: Poetry (March 2011).

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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

This poem originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of Poetry magazine

• Last Spring
  by Gottfried Benn
• House of Cedar, Rafters of Fir
  by Paul Hoover
• Industrious Amazement: A Notebook
  by Anna Kamienska

• March 2011 Table of Contents
• Subscribe to Poetry magazine
• About Poetry magazine
• Buy This Issue

More about this poem

Biography

Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) served in the German army’s medical corps during WWI and used his clinical experiences as inspiration for his first collections of poetry, Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912) and Fleisch (1917).

Continue reading this biography

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Poems by Gottfried Benn

• from “Late”
• “Zeh was a pharmacist”
• A Shadow on the Wall
• Asters
• Beautiful Youth

• More poems by Gottfried Benn (26 poems)
  • Can Be No Sorrow
  • Caryatid
  • Divergences
  • Evenings of Certain Lives
  • Express Train
  • Finis Poloniae
  • Fragments 1953
  • Gladioli
  • Hymn
  • Jena
  • Last Spring
  • Left the House
  • Little Aster
  • People Met
  • Radio
  • Static Poems
  • The Young Hebbel
  • They Are Human After All
  • Think of the Unsatisfied Ones
  • Tracing
  • What’s Bad

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Living, The Body, The Mind, Love, Infatuation & Crushes

POET’S REGION Germany

Poetic Terms Free Verse

If you disagree with this poem's categorization, make a suggestion.

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Related

Audio

• The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Expert in Earth, Eager in Flesh
• The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Poetry Takes a Walk

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