is like a bat,
its habitat is in cellars,
attics, caves,
by day it sleeps,
it hunts by night,
it hangs head downwards.

It takes great imagination
to compare it to a bird.

It is blind,
it emits signals,
it receives signals.
You could say: it hears
only itself alone.

People used to think it lived
on human blood, but it's
happy with a fly,
a maybug or a moth.

When I was little,
I used to go out at dusk
"bat hunting".

I would throw stones upwards,
and the bat would dive
after them, at the last moment
it would realize this was
a trick and immediately
correct its flight.

Sometimes, when the stone
was bigger, the bat crashed
into it and fell to the ground. Poetry,

if it is, resembles
now a pebble,
sometimes a brick.
Translated by Antonia-Lloyd-Jones