1953 Poem by Gunnar Harding

It isn't everyone who grew up in a psychiatric house
with a green sofa that reeked of neuroses
though the place was forever being aired out
even on cold winter days when the bullfinches
sat bleeding in the bare apple trees.
It isn't everyone who knows what it means
to sit on a parapet
high up and without a flyboard
although you can see others flying by,
some of them even sitting up in their beds.

The fear of falling gives rise to such fantasies.
Nonetheless you fall each night into the cellar,
that little room full of cells inside your forehead
where murmuring voices are constantly drowned out
by the ventilation system that hums and whirs
but never gets serious about dispersing
the deep feeling of guilt,
stronger than all visual impressions.

Was the only salvation to live in reverse?
The psychiatrist himself sat lost in thought
behind his desk.
You quickly learned never to tell your dreams.
They only deepened his pondering and made him
walk in circles with his hands folded on his back.

The fragments of dream that ended up in sketchbooks
were filed in stacks in the attic,
waiting for what? Waiting for the day
when they would merge
into a decipherable whole, and when the guilt
whose surface tension was increasing all the time
would explode and I would rocket up backwards
from the deep end like a high diver
and stand there, brightly lit,
completely dry and completely true,
for the truth is almost always naked.
This scared me more
than the voices murmuring below.