The tidal motion of refugees, not the flight of wild geese,
 the faces in freight cars, haggard and coal-eyed,
 particularly the peaked stare of children,
 the huge bundles crossing bridges, axles creaking
 as if joints and bones were audible, the dark stain
 spreading on maps whose shapes dissolve their frontiers
 the way that corpses melt in a lime-pit or
 the bright mulch of autumn is trampled into mud,
 and the smoke of a cypress signals Sachsenhausen,
 those without trains, without mules or horses,
 those who have the rocking chair and the sewing machine
 heaped on a human cart, a waggon without horses
 for horses have long galloped out of their field
 back to the mythology of mercy, back to the cone
 of the orange steeple piercing clouds over the lindens
 and the stone bells of Sunday over the cobbles,
 those who rest their hands on the sides of their carts
 as if they were the flanks of mules, and the women
 with flint faces, with glazed cheekbones, with eyes
 the colour of duck-ponds glazed over with ice,
 for whom the year has only one season, one sky:
 that of rooks flapping like torn umbrellas,
 all have been reduced into a common language,
 the homeless, the province-less, to the incredible memory
 of apples and clean streams, and the sound of milk
 filling the summer churns, where are you from,
 what was your district, I know that lake, I know the beer,
 and its inns, I believed in its mountains,
 now there is a monstrous map that is called Nowhere
 and that is where we're all headed, behind it
 there is a view called the Province of Mercy,
 where the only government is that of the apples
 and the only army the wide banners of barley
 and its farms are simple, and that is the vision
 that narrows in the irises and the dying
 and the tired whom we leave in ditches
 before they stiffen and their brows go cold
 as the stones that have broken our shoes,
 as the clouds that grow ashen so quickly after danw
 over palm and poplar, in the deceitful sunrise
 of this, your new century.