Poetry at Sangam

Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.

by Ulrike Almut Sandig

but I won’t say a thing about the way the trees
shimmer in the light, nor about the trees themselves.

not a word about the beech tree in the doctor’s yard
while her daughter is dying upstairs, not a word

about the foxglove tree in our own backyard, where
you and I sit out late every night and act like its only

in the poems I write that the doctor’s daughter
is real. of the shimmer of the trees in the light

I

will give nothing away but the very tips
the tips of the trees that sway in the wind

and the needles that are always green. I will
act like only that flickering, fevered light

stitched into the tips of the fir trees is real.
but not their trunks crowded beneath, never
those slender shadows, the forest, the trees themselves.

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