And while the outside world rattles
with endless rubble, juddering until,
slamming doors and knocking chandeliers,
it crumples into the core of trembling heart,

the unbounded pests of the sky flit by,
twisting the face of Nature into a diurnal grimace,
and then they vanish, perhaps, behind the gnomes, the lakes,

so that the darkness, like a long night cap,
and the frost, like the collective fatigue
of a sprawling community, settles over the tremors
of the spastic landscape. And starlings take flight.

translated by by Paul Vermeersch