1.
In the end each and every one will become land.
Fertile tributaries, sliding banks - these cause their lapse.
The rain of limestone plates, fine like dust,
will grow inside them thick layers of chalk.
Birches and black alders will claim them from the shore.
Thousands, dozens of thousands of years, depending on the size:
that's how long they will live,
chinks of dark water glinting between the hills,
heavy lake bowls eroded in boulder-clay
on the Pre-Cambrian foundation.

2.
Small brown-water lake with a bird-nest of an island -
measured with the span of my life,
you're nearly eternal. Next to yours, my life's just
a groove of rain runnels.

And yet land has already entered you. You're losing your open waters.
Offshore reed-mace and club-rush are building a floor for themselves:
step by step they'll walk it to your center, where gulls dive now.

Arms of the same delta toil inside us.
Days, like flat-bottomed boats, knock hull against hull, rocked by sun
in the small bay -

the same wave
carries me and you, and every stick, and never stops



(From: "Monodia" 2006)

translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese