Translated by A. Z. Foreman - d**h Has no Terror (from "Trojan Women") lyrics

Is it the truth that souls live on beyond the buried flesh? Or just a myth to drug weak hearts with hope for something else? When fingers of the one we love ease our eyes shut forever, when our last day blots out the light of days that lay ahead, and the grim urn has sealed away the ash that was our self, can we not give our being up in the grave's gift of d**h? Are we, poor things, condemned to live through more existence yet? Or is d**h something absolute, no fraction of us left when our soul, like a burst of air commingling overhead with vaporous and fleeting clouds, flees with our last gasped breath and the cremation torches' tongues have licked our naked flesh? All that the Sun sees on its rise or in its setting glow, all that the Sea's blue billows wash with global ebb and flow, is pulled by Pegasus-swift Time doomward. All things must go. As the cyclonic cosmos' whirl the Zodiac we see, and Sun, the Lord of Stars, spins out the roll of centuries, and Moon in witching orbit's arc speeds to Her destiny, as all things extant go the way they must go, so do we. He who has reached the stagnant waves of Styx, the Netherstream where gods are sworn to ceaseless truth, has simply ceased to be. As smoke from sputtering fire, we soil the atmosphere, then fade. As the rain-pregnant clouds you see first darken the blue day are scattered by the sudden Northwind's chill blasts, then dissipate, the souls that rule our flesh will flow apart without a trace. For there is nothing after d**h and d**h is not a state only the finish line of this swift existential race. Lay down your greed for a reward, your fears of punishment. When greedy Time and gnashing Chaos devour us, we just end. For d**h can be no partial thing. When it destroys the flesh it nullifies the soul. There is no afterlife, no Hell, no hellhound guardian at the gates to block escape attempts, no savage tyrant Lord who rules the kingdom of the dead. These are no more than hollow folktales unworthy of attention, fragments of fantasy and myth turned nightmare and deception. You ask "where will we go when we are dead forevermore?" You'll be with the unborn.