Towers of Birdcalls...

Come and go and come again,
come and stay, a house,
a house of mist, stands before the forest,
roofs of smoke,
towers of birdcalls,
birch-branches secure the door at evening.


...

~ Images: Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy by Lucien Rudaux, circa 1959.


~ Text: Poems by Johannes Bobrowski, translated by the Meads, Shadow Lands, New Directions, 1984.

To be Wrecked in Seas Like These....

Johann Schroeter, Selentopographische fragment, 1791

I’ve always loved this lonesome hill
And this hedge that hides
The entire horizon, almost, from sight.
But sitting here in a daydream, I picture
The boundless spaces away out there, silences
Deeper than human silence, an unfathomable hush
In which my heart is hardly a beat
From fear. And hearing the wind
Rush rustling through these bushes,
I pit its speech against infinite silence –
And a notion of eternity floats to my mind,
And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So,
In this immensity of my thoughts all drown;
And it’s easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

~ Infinitive, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

Starry Silence....

And the trees and the night
Don't move anymore
Except from nests

~ Giuseppe Ungaretti

.

Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good
and not puffed up at all, something almost atomic — a
grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a crystal of clean salt...

~ C. E. Montague

...

~ Image: Gisele Celan-Lestrange