I have spent my life keeping others from harm, but I have suffered. Now that I have been returned to the mountain, I am safe at last.
It was a wise man who wrote:
The ore feels homesick. It wants to abandon
the minting houses and the wheels
that offer it such a meager life.
And out of factories and payroll boxes
it wants to go back into the veins
of the thrown-open mountain,
which will close again behind it.
The Golden Ball Returned in The Lion and the Cat, Brown Fairy Book. (Lines by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Selected Poems, trans. Robert Bly.)
