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Generations
For my daughter
Translated by Carolyn Kizer

Loving another, yet she married my father.
That other portrait faded with the years.
From her album paged in musty velvet
Shimmered forth his paling, yellowing smile,

To watch her embroider a towel or tablecloth:
She pricked the vivid silk with her nostalgia.
The stitches flowed like narrow streams of blood.
The seams were silvered with her silent tears.

And my grandmother-how little I know of her life!-
Only her hands’ tremor, and the blue seam of her lips.
How can I imagine my grandfather’s love of her?
I can will myself to believe in her suffering.

No letter remains, no, not a scrap of paper
Did she will us; only pots in the attic
Crudely patched: tangible maimed witnesses
to a dead life: the young widow, the mother of five.

So she planted a luxuriant garden
That would embrace the newly barren house
And her new barrenness. So the trees grew,
Obedient to her will, in perfect rows.

Now my daughter is just sixteen
As I was on that quiet day in May
When I became pregnant of a single word
Scented with lilac, the remote song of a bird.

A few letters, and what is called “a slender volume”:
These are the relicts of my life. I lacked perspective
On happiness, so I ran ever faster
To escape the happy boundaries of my fate.

Listen, my daughter, never go in pursuit!
It all lies there, in the woven strands of blood.
How the straight trees whisper in the grandmother’s garden!
Only listen! These dim echoes in my poem…

But what can sixteen years conceive of sorrow?
And pensiveness? the tremor of old lives?
For her, only the eternal beginnings.
Where she goes, old shadows kiss her footprints.
Somewhere, in white lilac, the nightingale
Gasps out his fragile song

Which ends always with the note of eternal beginning.

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