Having survived this: to experience delight
passing joyfully, quietly, and thoroughly.
Sometimes the test was silent, sometimes it was verbal.
Who didn’t look back in surprise?

No one was able to do it, because life is true,
because no one could. —But the infinite
attempts! The new green of the beech
is not as new as what is happening to us.

A wood dove coos. And again it seems to you, oh
what you suffered, as yet unlived through.
The dove keeps calling. You are in the middle
of the bird’s call. At the same time awake and weak.

 

Schloss Berg am Irchel, beginning of April 1921

 

 

Translated from the German by Wally Swist

 

 

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Wally Swist’s Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois) was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. He also authored Aperture (Kelsay), a collection of poems on caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s.

 

 

 

Photo by Benjamin Grimm on Unsplash