| From the book The Wild Rose | Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978) |  |
| Mountain Lullaby | | To Vika Naveriani | There are many empty cradles in the hazel thickets.
The dead have become children and want to be sat with,
to be rocked and calmed and sung to:
o my heart, sleep now, there will be nothing like you.
The night is over me and is so depressed over me
that the spring falls and the trees answer it,
grow higher and meeting with other springs...
o my heart, sleep now, there is nothing like you.
When you slept, you would look in on us through the window.
Last year’s pancake is drying out on the table for you.
There will be none other. Another is a compromise, a blunder,
o my heart, sleep now, there will be nothing like you.
There is an old man there and he mentions you with a bow,
as though he is lifted on a narrow palm.
He knows that God hears him, but does not touch the bread
and he lifts his palms and begs Him to take.
Sleep now, my heart, all the stones, grasses and hands –
they look as if a widow begat them and fell on the earth of parting,
and the cry continued as a spring, and the answering sounds
raised a nutgrove from the earth and became on their own...
Oh, it’s pamful to live. But we arose and looked
at the nutgrove by the house where there are so many cradles.
Others did not dare but we endured to the end,
o my heart, sleep now, there will be nothing like you.
And I am standing now, and the trees are like a shirt on me.
I look at the window and hold on my palms without fear
a terribly light palmful of ashes that grieve no one.
O my heart, sleep now, there will be nothing like you. | | Richard McKane | |
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