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Beyond
Land and Time |
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Daughter (Āmār
Translated by Joe Winter This is my younger daughter—the last one. On the edge of the bed she lies, lies there—sits up—speaks like a bird and away she crawls, into the fields, into the skies . . . I forget her—here’s my first daughter floating, it seems,
down the clouds’ path. ‘Are you well, daddy, well, daddy?—love me?’ I take her hand: it’s all smoke, her face—white as cloth! ‘Does it hurt you? When I died—you still remember? So her two hands silently she plies about my eyes, about my face, the dead daughter; my hands too her face finger; but no face is there—no
hair no eyes. But it’s her I want—just her, nothing besides that’s in the world, blood flesh eyes hair—that daughter first daughter of mine—that bird—white bird—I long for; she understood all it seemed—and so upon her a new life came,
that dead girl, suddenly near. Said she: ‘You have wanted me so my little sister— your tiny daughter, under the grass I set her where so long in darkness I was sleeping and then I came’—the daughter paused in fear, and I said: ‘Go back to your sleeping— return your little
sister from that keeping.’ That soul in pain—stood silently for a time, then smoke, and so there fell away slowly all of her, like white sheet wrapping the air round once— at some point then a rook’s caw— I see the small one play and crawl— there’s no one more.
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