Wednesday 17 August 2016

Johannes Bobrowski: Night-Swallows



I
Cold,
the pierced air,
the black and the white, light, speaking
on routes of birds. The evening, its
bull-horn
aslant in the fire-smoke on the
horizon. You saw
the fish rise, as the waters
clashed, you took your hand
from my eyes, blackness flew
round us and without wing
and without cry.

II
We breathed,
the roof on my shoulder
was light and like a rain
skyless
the needles strewn in the sand,
night-swallows, souls,
where shadow was,
thick on the earth,
cold.


Tr. Ruth & Mathew Mead. A poem from the German Baltic. D.H. Lawrence also wrote of swallows in the gloom: "Look up, and you see things flying / Between the day and the night; / Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together." Lawrence's swallows turn out to be bats; is that also what Bobrowski is seeing?

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