Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

Translation – Sean O’Brien

Translation

 

No, we were never introduced,
Yet she and I were long acquainted.
I know all her ways and all
The tunes this pale usurper sings
To those she has seduced
Beneath the blanching mays
And left, like her, demented.
So eminently natural
That even nature must defer
Before her instinct to conserve,
In leopard shoes and silver rings	
The maenad roves out now
To see into the life of things
And sow her poison at the root,
To claim the earth, to claim the air,
To rid the world of witnesses
Until, in her divine enclosure,
She alone is there.
No, we were never introduced.
What purpose could I serve?
I am no one she’d remember,
Being the merest subject, left –
Far more than I deserve -
To wander in her private grove
Until her work was done. 
Now, in the aftermath of love,
The world is all December:
This is trespass: I must go,
And may the heartless, witless 
Creature neither care nor know.

 
 
A re-casting of A E Housman


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