Quick! Colors through the window
Colors on fields and forests
Before the weather changes
And changes everything
Empties fields and forests of their substance
And ponds and farms
How fleeting the sun is!
How the sky mocks our admiring gaze
Eternity is an optical illusion
Immensity a dubious abstraction
The wheatfields' gold - quick!
The pink of bricks piled on a building-site - quick!
The foliage's chilly green - quick!
The rust-color of bushes, train-tracks, roadbeds - quick!
The yellow of colza in nearly-black fields
The silver of streams
The silt-browned green of fish-filled rivers - quick!
Cabbages' purple in well-mannered squares - quick!
The road's grey - quick!
The absolute blue of clear sun-softened autumn days - quick!
Red! Red! Tractors', cars', traffic-lights' red - quick!
The red of a hunter's cap, his rifle wedged in his armpit - quick!
(And soon the imagined red of a slain beast's blood)
The metallic green of our roadside poplars - quick!
Blue slate roofs - quick!
The blue of distant mountains - quick!
Stone blue, horizon blue,
Blue light falling in a fine mist on the world - quick!
And white - I had almost forgotten white - the white of dusty roads, earthen ones
The white of cows lazing in pastures - quick!
Omnipresent white, that the eye disdains
Of a wall between two cypresses, of trucks going swiftly past
White - quick!
Then black! Black! The black of fertile earth ploughed over and over again - quick!
The black of a horse driven mad by the trains
Who gallops in crazed circles alongside the fence - quick!
The black of a village chimney silent as a closed mouth - quick!
The black of a village church-bell never to be caught up in the savior's arms -
quick!
White, black, green, pink, blue and gold -
Quick! Quick! Quick!

Translation: 2013, Marilyn Hacker