and my father's face like the headlight on the front of a train
growing smaller and smaller in the distance,
and my mother closed all the many clouds inside her brown closet,
and as I walked up my street
the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,
blood that wanted to get out in many wars
and through many openings,
that's why it knocks upon my head from the inside
and reaches my heart in angry waves.
But now, in the spring of '52, I see
that more birds have returned than left last winter.
And I walk back down the hill to my house,
and in my room: the woman, whose body is heavy
and filled with time .
Philip Levine
WAKING IN MARCH
Translated
by
Stephen Mitchell
Last night, again, I dreamed
my children were back at home,
small boys huddled in their separate beds,
and I went from one to the other
listening to their breathing- regular,
almost soundless - until a white light
hardened against the bedroom wall,
the light of Los Angeles burning south
of here, going at last as we
knew it would. I didn't waken.
Instead the four of us went out
into the front yard and the false dawn
that rose over the Tehachipis and stood
in our bare feet on the wet lawn
as the world shook like a burning house.
