Blind Men

Pieter Bruegel

The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind

Blind Men

Consider them, my soul: how hideous!

Eerie as sleepwalkers, vaguely absurd

as dummies are - dummies that can walk,

blinking their useless lids at nothingness.
Their eyes are quenched, and yet they seem to stare

at something, somewhere, questioning the sky

and never bending their benighted heads

in reverie toward the cobblestones.
What difference between their infinite dark

and the eternal silence? Round us all,

meanwhile, the city sings, and laughs, and screams,
man in pursuit of pleasure, whereas I ...

I too drag by, but wonder, duller still,

what Heaven holds for them, all these blind men?

~ Charles Baudelaire ~
(tr. Richard Howard)