Voices, scored into
the waters' green.
When the kingfisher dives,
the split second whirs:
What stood by you
appears on every shore
mown down
into another image.
* * *
Voices from the nettles:
Come to us on your hands.
All you can read, alone
with a lamp, is your palm.
* * *
Voices, night-knotted, ropes
on which you hang your bell.
Dome yourself over, world:
when death's shell washes up on shore
a bell will want to ring.
* * *
Voices that make your heart
recoil into your mother's.
Voices from the hanging tree
where old growth and young growth
exchange rings.
* * *
Voices, guttural, amid the debris,
where even infinity shovels,
runnels of
(cardio-) slime.
Launch here the boats I manned,
my son.
Amidships, when an evil wind takes charge,
the clamps and brackets close.
Jacob's voice:
The tears.
Tears in the eye of my brother.
One clung. It grew.
We live in there.
Now, breathe -
so it may
fall.
* * *
Voices inside the ark:
Only
the mouths
were saved. Hear us,
o sinking things.
* * *
No
voice -
late noise, stranger to the hour,
gift to your thoughts, born of
wakefulness here in the final
account: a
carpel, large as an eye, and deeply
scored: bleeds
sap, and won't
heal over.
Copyright © 2000 Paul Celan (translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh)
Voices, scored into
the German written by Paul Celan