My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction. 

My Country
Those who say my country means
Meadows, flowers and fields of wheat,
Hamlets and trenches, must confess
These are her feet.

The child is not forced from his mother’s arms,
The youth at her side will grow
While she leans on her eldest son,
These are my laws.

My country’s brow has not risen here;
My flesh’s beyond Euphrates and the Flood,
My spirit soars above Chaos,
I pay rent to the world.

No nation fashioned or saved me,
I recall eternity’s span:
David’s key unlocked my lips,
Rome called me man.

I fall on the sand to wipe with my hair
My country’s blood-stained feet,
But I know her face and crown
Radiant like the sun of suns.

My ancestors have known no other;
Her feet with my hand I used to feel;
I often kissed the clumsy sandal strap
Round her heel.

They needn’t teach me where my country lies;
Hamlets, trenches and fields of wheat,
Flesh and blood and this her scar
Are her print, her feet.

Let us hurry to love people they depart so quickly

Leaving only their shoes and silence on the phone

Only what is unimportant tends to drag like a cow

The most important is so fast that happens in split-second

Silence that follows – normal and unbearable

Is like a clarity born straight from despair

When we think about someone who is no longer with us

Please do not be so certain that there is still time left

For certainty happens to be most uncertain

It takes away our sensitivity along with happiness

And comes concurrently like pathos and humour

Just like two different passions yet not as strong as one

Tend to die down so quickly, like thrush song in July

Like a sound somewhat clumsy or a vacuous bow

They have to close their eyes in order to truly see

And even though to be born is a greater risk than to die

We love still to little and always to late

Do not write about it too often but write once and for all

And you will become like a dolphin both gentle and strong

Let us hurry to love people, they depart so quickly

And those who are not, will not always return

And you never know while speaking of love

Is the first one last, or the last one first.

I would like to describe the simplest emotion 

joy or sadness 

but not as others do 

reaching for shafts of rain or sun 

I would like to describe a light 

which is being born in me 

but I know it does not resemble 

any star 

for it is not so bright 

not so pure 

and is uncertain 

I would like to describe courage 

without dragging behind me a dusty lion 

and also anxiety 

without shaking a glass full of water 

to put it another way 

I would give all metaphors 

in return for one word 

drawn out of my breast like a rib 

for one word 

contained within the boundaries 

of my skin 

but apparently this is not possible 

and just to say—I love 

I run around like mad 

picking up handfuls of birds 

and my tenderness 

which after all is not made of water 

asks the water for a face 

and anger 

different from fire 

borrows from it 

a loquacious tongue 

so is blurred 

so is blurred 

in me 

what white-haired gentlemen 

separated once and for all 

and said 

this is the subject 

and this is the object 

we fall asleep 

with one hand under our head 

and with the other in a mound of planets 

our feet abandon us 

and taste the earth 

with their tiny roots 

which next morning 

we tear out painfully