Sunday, April 24

- Hölderlin

"If having gone so far from one another
On distant ways, if across all the ways
And all the time, you know me still who was
Your partner in those days in all the sorrow,
Then something after all is left of it all.

Where's she who loved you waiting for you now? -
Here in the Civic Garden, just as before,
Here where in memory once again we're meeting,
In the dusk, as before, and after all the sorrow,
Beside the flowing black original river.

There were those moments, I remember there were those moments,
When you, so closed up in yourself, were able,
With me, to be, if, just for a moment, less so.
There was something good about that, for you, for me.
The time went by as if there was no trouble.

I remember how you showed me all those places
That though this was my country I had never
Visited or seen as through your eyes,
The open fields, and also the hidden places
Looking from concealment out over the sea.

Was it in springtime then? Was it in summer?
The nightingales and the other birds were singing
And the fragrance of the trees was all around us;
And the hyacinth, the violets, the tulips,
Green ivy on the housewalls, green the shadows

Of the pathways where we walked together then,
Thinking it all, after all, was possible.
It wasn't that you were different than you were,
Nor I than I, but that we were for awhile
All right together in our separate selves..."

David Ferry, "She Speaks Across the Years"

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home