Night Ray by Paul Celan

Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one:

to her I send the coffin of lightest wood.

Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in Rome;

it wears a white wig as I do and speaks hoarsely:

it talks as I do when I grant admittance to hearts.

It knows a French song about love, I sang it in autumn

when I stopped as a tourist in Lateland and wrote my letters to morning.

A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings.

I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye.

Now you are young as a bird dropped dead in March snow,

now it comes to you, sings you its love song from France.

You are light: you will sleep through my springs till it’s over.

I am lighter:

in front of strangers I sing.

From “Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche (W.W. Norton & Co.: 812 pp., $19.95) Copyright 1997 Reprinted by permission.