By Half The Sky

Translated by Alan McConnel Duff

We settled like birds
on the highest tops
of the neighbour’s cherry-tree,
and the light poured over our palms
and through, over the branches and trunk
down to the ground. Over the hillslope
down to the sea, famished desires
were warbling over days without hours,
which we arranged like precious jewellery
around suntanned necks
and learned how the shadow
always shifts with the sun.
We did not lock the doors of the house
made of the scent of the pines.
We each had our own key
which also unlocked the sea
on the heated surface,
so that we fell into the cooled depths
like circus monkeys
and each time returned barely by a hair
bigger.
When in the evening we observed the outcome
of the game, we were silent,
since we did not have words
for the end,
which always comes from far away and is small,
like a dot on the horizon
before it becomes a ship,
big – if you look upwards from below –

by half the sky.

 

Published in the Vilenica 2012 Almanac.