Sursum Corda in Lauterbrunnen

Whoever has lost faith, that vital sense of awe,
regains it here with sights and sounds of nature raw,
the rugged truths of Lauterbrunnen’s healing law,
its fauna, flora, landscapes, primal elements
of water, wind, vertiginous escarpments,
glaciers giving us a wistful wink... What wonderments
of dozens of cascades, eternal waters tossing, rushing, falling
thundering in torrents, spraying, splashing, calling
on the cosmos, re-enacting Gaia’s furious labour pains…
Here stalwart rocks surrender to diluvial rains,
great gorges dug in olden times by glacial waters
stirred by Oceanids, the stormy Titan daughters,
dazzle us as wild, tempestuous metaphors
of God’s Creation, promising propitious shores.

Once Goethe paused in Lauterbrunnen, tempted by
the Staubbach’s mystic falls. He meditated on the why
of things -- ephemeral and lasting -- here he wrote a song
to human destinies and reveries far flung.
The soul, like water, ever changing, ever striving,
driven forth by winds and hymns, inspiring
us to heaven, to the heights from whence we all
have come, to new baptisms in the water’s free fall.
Here, in pantheistic play cascades the Staubbach fall,
three hundred meters tall it drops the vertical rock wall.

In Lauterbrunnen we forget obsessions,
urban phobias, reap sustainable impressions.
Here we quit the habits of the misanthrope
and raise our eyes and hearts in buoyant
sursum corda, rediscover that flamboyant
trust in beauty, rescue joie de vivre, reclaim hope!

(c) Alfred de Zayas, 3 September 2021 

© Alfred de Zayas