A dramatic fantasy scene with a glowing golden heart and a cracked stone heart on an alchemist's table, flanked by moonlit stained glass and an autumn forest.

Gold and Stone of Hearts I am an alchemist, whose lines are a crucible, In it the voices of eras and lyres are fused. Listen: O heart that has become gold, And O heart that has turned to granite. I. Stone There are hearts ground to rubble by rain, Into the heavy flagstones of a cold "impossible." The hot September sky will not rekindle them, The piercing blue of January will not illuminate them. They lie in the chest like an unbroken masonry, Where every breath is a speck of dust on a slab. Their compassion is a ghost, pale and furtive, Their world is a deaf fortress in the void. Oh, these souls that have forgotten flight! Life lashes them like the ocean lashes rocks. Tears in dried-up gilding are foreign to them, Their destiny is a shimmering mist. II. Golden And there are hearts that Love itself has forged from pain in its crucible of days. They are like molten salts of all the oceans, overturned above it. They burn, furious and hot, Their heaviness is only an excess supply of what they give without measure to all the suffering who call upon them in their hour. They flow like living, thick blood through the veins of the world, parched by insults. Their gift is inexhaustible health of a soul that preserves every tear. III. Suffering Among them are we. We are in eternal transition, now to the cold of stone, now to the light of gold. We stretch out our hands in indifferent weather to those whose souls are not yet blind. We are suffering. Our wounds are fresh. We search the Mehr sehen