Lehmann's Poetry (in English Translation)

Lehmann was blessed as a singer, poet, writer, artist and teacher. Here's a sampling of her poetry in an English by Judy Sutcliffe.

My mother's voice of dark gold
Rings out to me from distant child days.
She could, singing, say the most beautiful things,
And carry us, instinctively, involuntarily,
Out of the twilight of the everyday.

My mother's voice of shattered glass--
So I heard her sing when grey--
A tremulous search for silent sounds,
And I saw her eyes, wet with tears.

My own voice's burning glow
Rings out to me from a long lifespan,
From many coastlines, wonderful,
Far from my white and silent shore.

My own voice of shattered glass--
Lets me measure my mother's sorrow:
My eyes brim with the heat
Of her unforgotten tears
For this treasure she and I possessed.

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Roadrushing telegraph poles—
Graywhite smokeballs of cloudplay—
My train, toward its ever distant end
Racing, stamps its wellknown melody
Across the wide, waving prairie,
Through a still and golden evening light.

This breathless forward rushing,
This never pausing, never standing still,
This restless coming, restless going on
Was the surging song of my life,
Was music to me and delight and the sound
Of the turbulent beating of my heart.

But now I feel the tumult die away—
And a deep stillness wakes in me,
As I, surfacing from chaotic night,
See the world for the first time
And its beauty entirely understand,
Falling enraptured to my knees.

God fully gave to me his blessings,
And my voice offered praise in song,
It was my inmost melody.
But now my eyes will bathe
In the new beauty of blessings yet unheard,
In newly wakened, deeply conscious life.

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I never knew how much loveliness lives
In the branches of bare and leafless trees,
Nor that gold and silver lovingly weave themselves
Into bronze webbing in which buds dream
Of the coming, springdrunk exuberance;
I never knew of these best,

These sublime gifts, strewn before us,
I never had that time, could never rest,
Was always driven like a hunted animal.
But now the hunter is my quarry.
I've caught what hunted me, Time—and today
Upon its wings it has renewed my world.

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I was looking through old music scores today—
And the past hurled itself into my present...
O bounteous beauty that once was mine...
O fatefully renewed
In fleeing, world-vanishing time!
The delight of transformation—who can measure it,
Who only lives ONE life, bounded by reality?
Who never knows that sweet self-forgetfulness,
That lavish squandering of the self in Time,
The ego released in singing,
Loving and suffering—floating as if on wings
To a destiny foreign yet strangely one's own,
Soaring on the wings of music!