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Bolesław Leśmian

Transformations

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That night the dark was sultry, steamy with lust.
Cornflowers, lit up by dry lightning, flashed
Directly into a deer’s eye; into forest,
By foreign-pupils startled, deer then dashed.
The blooms azured her head, fled cervinely
And, greedy, watched the world cornfloweredly.
Having, amid a boundless meadow, found
Itself, a poppy with a shrill cry bled
Into a purple-plumaged cock, yet made no sound;
It shook, in his red comb, the very blood—
In darkness crowed, beak rent, poisoned with fear,
Till crows of other roosters crowded near.
The barley, ears with a thick longing golden,
With sudden spite bristled in rankled quills;
Crushed itself into a golden hedgehog; ran,
In transit pricking the herbs’ flimsy walls;
Whined, sulked at flowers in urchin-array . . .
But what it felt and lived through none can say.
And in what nettles did I burn my soul
That I flit stealthily, cross-country, at the edge?
Why do the flowers watch me, skeptical?
Have I some night-self, that’s beyond my knowledge?
To clasp my temples thus, what have I done?
What was I that night, which today is gone?

—translated from the Polish by Jakob Ziguras

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Vol. 43, No. 2

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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