In a collection of Egyptian statues

Out of eyes of precious stones
You look, eternal and still,
Over us later men and women.
It does not seem that love or need
Are known within your smoothly glinting row.
Royally and like some siblings of the stars
You were incomprehensible
As you strode between the temples,

Holiness blows like a distant whiff of gods 

Round your brows even today, 

Dignity round your knees;

Your beauty seems to breathe quite calmly,

Your homeland is eternity.

But, as for us, your much younger siblings,
Godless we reel along a lunatic life,
To all the torments of passion,
To every burning longing
See how our trembling souls stand greedily opened up.
For our goal is just death,
Our conviction is transience,
No remoteness of time
Overrides our pleading portraits.
Yet we also carry
A secret spiritual affinity
Burned into our souls,
Sensing the gods and feeling for you,
Silent images of the past,
A quite fearless love. So, now look,

No being is hateful to us, not even death,
Suffering and dying
Do not frighten our minds,
Because we learn to love more deeply!
Our hearts belong with the birds,
With the seas and with the woods, and we call
Slaves and the wretched our own kin,
Giving fond names to all the creatures and stones.
And so it is that the portraits
Of our passing existence
Will not persist beyond us carved in hard stone;
Smiling they will fade away
And in drifting sunlit dust motes
Will rise again each hour to new joys and torments
Once more impatient and everlasting.

In einer Sammlung agyptischer Bildwerke
Hermann Hesse, December 1913