Addressing the Cold

After one writes a very long post, as I did earlier this week, it seems proper to provide a much shorter one. So I offer you this poem:

Night Morning

by Grace Paley

To translate a poem
from thinking
into English
takes all night
night nights and days

English does
the best it can while
the mother's tongue Russian
omits the verb to be
again and again and
is always interfering
with the excited in-
dustrious brain wisely
the heart's beat asserts
control

also the newest English
argues with its old
singing ancestry
it thinks it knows best

finally the night's
hard labor peers through
the morning window observes
snow birds the sun caught
in white and black winter
birches disentangles itself
addresses the ice-cold meadow
for hours on the beauty of
the color green

It is from Fidelity by Grace Paley.

It’s difficult to translate thought into poetry, into words. We may address the cold all winter long on the subject of the colour green. We can use winter to draw closer to a holiness.

I leave you with this poem by Rumi, who I have not been reading often enough lately, but this will be rectified.

The Freshness

by Rumi

When it’s cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,
you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.