Water from cold springs
and glittering minerals
tirelessly wander.
Patient, unceasing,
they overcome granite, layers
of hungry gravel, iridescent
precincts of clay. If they abandon
themselves to the black
roots, it's only to go
up, as high as possible
through wells hidden
under the bark of fruit trees. Through
the green touched with gray of leaves,
fallen petals of white
flowers with rosy edges,
apples, heavy with sweet redness,
and their bitterish seeds.
Oh, waters from cold
springs and glittering
minerals! You are awaited
by a cirrus cloud with a sunny
fluid outline
and by the abyss of blue
which has been rinsed
in the just wind.
Translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Only the head remains,
a bird's white egg, life's
secret inside it.
Her eyebrows -
the simplest symbol
of the lily, an ideogram
of the lotus.
Invisible, closed
lids, a flat nose
and a vague trace
of the mouth.
The face is asleep.
From forehead to chin
a line: a scar
of external form,
a scratch that divides
this dream and joints it
to the world.
Translated by Andrzej Sosnowski
Motionless days, cold
and sunless, their height
marked by a rook's flight
over the park where last year's
leaves lie rotting, and over
the suburban field where kids
set fire to dead grass
again
Translated by Andrzej Sosnowski
To lie on the pavement. To be
at the bottom of this puddle,
dark as lead. To rot
at the curb, in cold mud
as a poplar leaf. To lie
on the pavement, under a street lamp.
At the bottom of the puddle.
As a bus ticket or a newspaper scrap
no one will read.
Translated by Andrzej Sosnowski