I have no desire for rhetoric, for platitudes, and cannot find the words as deep and great as my awe for mankind, as my awe for its creation. Not wit… - Anna Margolin

I am now old and weary. Life storms and seethes just as before, casting incandescent yearnings into human souls, summoning them to happiness and suffering, but life no longer knocks on my door: its waves do not reach as far as my threshold. I have already drained my glass to the very dregs. I am weary. My lonely days, my sleepless nights, pass in peaceful silence-without joy, without pain, without desire. With each new day and each passing night I creep one step closer to eternal peace and calm-to death. And the closer I get to death the more intently my gaze lingers on my tear-soaked, paper-garland-crowned youth. During sleepless nights I see, paraded before me, the shadows of those who bore light or shade in my soul, causing it to quake out of love or hatred.

Reality and dreams are weaving together, flowing into each other and I don't know where one ends and the other begins.

Why must one rhyme?... My work demands otherwise. I require bad rhymes because I don't want good ones... I know shvayg rhymes with tsvayg and shtayg; lebn with shvebn and shtrebn; himl with driml... but I require something different. I am insulted by the mechanical precision of the conventional rhyme. Somewhere, perhaps in only one syllable, the words should agree. I want the third and fourth lines to be subtly evocative of the first line with the colour of a word, with a sound that is but a shadow, a pale echo of the previously used sound.