Next to the Great Empires

We’ve been praying and toiling.
We’ve been praying and toiling and battling.
So we had no time for scheming.

Our words, shot at our childhood,
have been like punitive arrows.
And our spears like miraculous birds.

We’ve been battling and living on.
Everlastingly next to the great empires.
And we are speaking our mother tongue.

The Red Apple

A red apple

Has found abode on my table.

Its light has suffused

The sheets of paper, my books, my whole room.

Red all over like a sphere of fire holdover.

Only a small

Round

White,

Spot

− like a teardrop −

Midway recalls the rover.

A memory left by a leaf’s lot.

And, as I sit and look at the apple

Coming from afar, from home,

The white tear resembles

A familiar eye, a peaceful dome,

Through which there glances with glee

The garden where I grew up as if in a kingdom,

The bloomed grafted tress and the bees,

The lucerne with its soft pipe pleas,

The garrulous flocks of trush within earshot.

And all my boyhood which I never forgot.

English version by Gabriela PACHIA