Slow Motion

Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows
If you only knew how strange it is to be there
It is a world without sound, without colour
Every thing there the earth, the trees, the people
The water and the air is dipped in monotonous grey
Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces
And the leaves of the trees are ashen grey
It is not life but its shadow
It is not motion but its soundless spectre

But suddenly a strange flicker pass through the screen
And the picture is coming to live
Into the darkness in which you sit
Somewhere from afar people appear
And loom larger as they come closer to you
In the foreground children are playing with a dog
Bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street
Picking their way among the carriages
All this moves, teems with life and
Upon approaching the edge of the screen
Banishes somewhere beyond it
And all this in strange silence
Where no rumble of the wheels is heard
No sound of footsteps or of speech
Nothing

Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies
The movements of people
Noiselessly, the ashen grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind
And the grey silhouettes of the people
As though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished
By being deprived of all the colours of life
Glide noiselessly along the grey ground