Tonight, my love, fire walks through the city.
It walks the way I used to walk around.
It peeks, inquisitively, into the darkest nooks.
Lights up the dear, bewildered faces that have long gazed
at each other in the course of days turned into night
in the dense darkness of a basement without being seen,
but were merely touched, fearfully and gently carressed
with cold hands. Remembered by soft, frost-bitten fingertips.
The flame walks like a conqueror and a liberator.
Its triumphal stare sends icy shivers through the heart.
Before it, twilight thickens.
The twilight in which my mother, now for a long time
skin and bones, has not dared to look into a mirror.
Into a fragment of the mirror which multiplies
the grim nightfall within and around her,
embracing her wildly, protectively, like a dead lover.
Translated by Mia Dintinjana