“It is the trees that see us,
not we who see them.”
No names live in the wind
Near the stone the moss is cold and damp
as if the frozen earth already has started sweating from below
In me blood flows in an uncertain confidence
Lingonberry Sunday with Stanescu, thermos, wasp
Fire spotting aircraft high above a family with colourful berry buckets
High above the tops of the pine trees: cloud continents
just about to part, reconcile – drifting coral reefs
My head pounding like an idling
combine far away, unable to separate the chaff
from the wheat
and hair cap moss and heather everywhere
dry twigs and Sara who says: “I want to be
a pine that is never cut down – do you want to be a branch?”
What was I supposed to say? I thought: “I want to be all that is white,”
but answered: “Yes, I would like to be a branch, a branch
on the pine that is never cut down – ”
“It is the trees that see us…” is taken from the “Third Elegy” in The Struggle between Entrails and Reality by the Rumanian poet Nichita Stanescu.