O noon of life! O time to celebrate!

O summer garden!
Restlessly happy and expectant, standing,
Watching all day and night, for friends I wait:
Where are you, friends? Come! It is time! It’s late!

The glacier’s gray adorned itself for you

Today with roses;
The brook seeks you, and full of longing rises
The wind, the cloud, into the vaulting blue
To look for you from dizzy bird’s-eye view.

Higher than mine no table has been set:

Who lives so near
The stars or dread abysses half as sheer?
My realm, like none, is almost infinite,
And my sweet honey-who has tasted it?-----

--There you are, friends!--- Alas, the man you sought

You do not find here?
You hesitate, amazed? Anger were kinder!
I----changed so much? A different face and gait?
And what I am---for you, friends, I am not?

Am I another? Self-estranged?From me---

Did I elude?
A wrestler who too oft himself subdued?
Straining against his strength too frequently,
Wounded and stopped by his own victory?

I sought where cutting winds are at their worst?

I learned to dwell
Where no one lives, in bleakest polar hell,
Unlearned mankind and god, prayer and curse?
Became a ghost that wanders over glaciers?

__My ancient friends! Alas! You show the shock

Of love and fear!
No, leave! Do not be wroth! You—can’t live here__
Here, among distant fields of ice and rock-
Here one must be a hunter, chamois-like.

A wicked archer I’ve become.—The ends

Of my bow kiss;
Only the strongest bends his bow like this.
No arrow strikes like that which my bow sends:
Away from here—for your own good, my friends!---

You leave?---My heart: no heart has borne worse hunger;

Your hope stayed strong:
Don’t shut your gates; new friends may come along.
Let old ones go. Don’t be a memory-monger!
Once you were young---now you are even younger.

What once tied us together, one hope’s bond---

Who reads the signs
Love once inscribed on it, the pallid lines?
To parchment I compare it that the hand
Is loat to touch-discolored, dark, and burnt.

No longer friends—there is no word for those---

It is a wraith
That knocks at night and tries to rouse my faith,
And looks at me and says: “Once friendship was—“
---O wilted word, once fragrant as the rose.

Youth’s longing misconceived inconstancy

Those whom I deemed
Changed to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,
Have aged and lost our old affinity:
One has to change to stay akin to me.

O noon of life! Our second youthful state!

O summer garden!
Restlessly happy and expectant, standing,
Looking all day and night, for friends I wait:
For new friends! Come! It’s time! It’s late!

This song is over-- longing’s dulcet cry

Died in my mouth:
A wizard did it, friend in time of drought,
The friend of noon—no, do not ask me who—
At noon it was that one turned into two----

Sure of our victory, we celebrate

The feast of feasts:
Friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!
The world now laughs, rent are the drapes of fright,
The wedding is at hand of dark and light-------