she made this answer to me: a nightingale.
Now she is a nightingale.
Every night, night after night, I hear her
in the garden of my sleepless dream.
She is singing the Zion of her ancestors.
She is singing the long-ago Austria.
She is singing the hills and beech-woods
of Bukowina.
My nightingale
sings lullabies to me
night after night
in the garden of my sleepless dream.
(All quotations are from "After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets." Translations from the German by Eavan Boland. Princeton Univ. Press. Copyright © 2004 by Eavan Boland.)
