The lullaby, to a grown man like me,
Seemed far too childish; now the epitaph
Looms like a cliff above some wild and rough
Shore, where I'm cast by fate and where I sing
Oblivious to my fame, to everything
Except my grief And I, who never wrote
To court a living ear, have tuned my note
To appease the dead; in vain, alas! One rule
Applies to all, for man is Fortune's fool.
o
cruel, unjust law! How can you be
So implacable, so hard, Persephone!
Why did you have to snatch away my small
Girl who had hardly learned to live at all,
Who never came to full bloom in the light
Before her eyes closed underneath your night?
I wish she had not seen the world - for what
True sense of it could she, a child, have got?
She saw her birth and death; and then she fled
And turned hearts full of love to hearts of lead.
Translated from the Polish
by Stanislaw Baranczak and Seamus Heaney
ALFRED CORN
Water Like a Philosopher's Stone
Now, out of skies like lead, as the hoary old
cliche describes them, comes a massive snowfall,
no doubt the one barometers deep in the bone
and wide-eyed weathercasters were predicting.
An unplanned celebration for us all:
errands done, there's time, before we scuttle
home, for a twilight walk, as fine-grained drifts
of industrial diamond renovate a city.
