Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that labor
at night stopped? And the water
wheel of thought,
is it dry, the cups empty,
wheeling, carrying only shadows?

No my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

translated b y Robery Bly

And what if after so much history, we succumb,
not to eternity,
but to those simple things, like being
at home, or starting to brood!
What if we discover later
all of a sudden, that we are living
to judge by the height of the stars
off a comb and off stains on a handkerchief!
It would be better, really,
if it were all swallowed up, right now!

They’ll say we have a lot
of grief in one eye, and a lot of grief
in the other also, and when they look
a lot of grief in both . . .
So then! . . . Naturally! . . . So! . . . Don’t say a word!

translated by Robert Bly

Yesterday, tomorrow, today
suffering for everything,
my heart is a sad goldfish bowl,
a pen of dying nightingales.

I have plenty of heart.

Today I rip out my heart,
I who have a bigger heart than anyone
and having that, I am the bitterest also.

I don’t know why, I don’t know how or why
I let my life keep on going every day.

translated by Robert Bly

Our Spaniard yawns.
Is it from hunger? Sleepiness? Boredom?
Doctor, could it be an empty stomach?
“The emptiness is, rather, in his head.”

translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney

I notice, in passing, that I’m growing old,
that the immense mirror
where I gazed so proudly one day
holds a quicksilver image of myself.
In the mirror in the depths of my house,
Fate’s hand
scratches the quicksilver away, and everything passes
through it like light through glass.

translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney

Last night I dreamed I heard
God shout to me: Watch out!
Later it was God who was sleeping,
and I screamed back: Wake up!

translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney

You say nothing is created?
It doesn’t matter; with the clay
of the earth, make a cup
so your brother can drink.

translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney

Empirical faith. We neither are nor will be.
All our life is on loan.
We brought nothing; we will take nothing away.

translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney

To remember is not always to go back to what was,
for memory holds seaweed dragging up
wonders,
alien objects that never floated.
A light racing through chasms
lights up earlier years I’ve never lived,
which I recall like yesterday.
About 1900
I was strolling in a Paris park . . . it was
enveloped in fog.
My dress was the same color as the mist.
The light was the same as now
after seventy years.
Now the brief storm is over
and through the pane I see people walk by
near this window so near the clouds.
A time that is not mine
seems to rain inside my eyes.

translated by Willis Barnstone