TO A HAZEL TREE

You do not recognize me, but it’s me all the same,
The one who used to make my bows by cutting your brown
branches,
So straight and so swift in their reaching for the sun.
You grew large, your shade is huge, you send up new shoots.
It’s a pity I’m not a boy anymore.
Now I could cut for myself only a stick, for, as you see, I walk with a
cane.


I loved your brown bark with its whitish tinge, its true hazel color.
I’m glad that some oaks and ashes have survived,
But I rejoice at seeing you, magical as always, with the pearls of your
nuts
With the generations of squirrels that have danced in you.

This is something of a Heraclitean meditation: I stand here
Remembering my bygone self and life as it was but also as it could
have been.
Nothing lasts, but everything lasts: a great stability,
And I try to locate my destiny in it.
Which, in truth, I did not want to accept.
I was happy with my bow stalking at the edge of a fairy tale.
What happened to me later deserves no more than a shrug;
It is only biography, i.e., fiction.

POSTSCRIPTUM
Biography or fiction or a long dream.

Layers of white clouds on a fragment of sky between the brightness of
the birches.

A vineyard, yellow and rusty in the approaching dusk.
For a short time I was a servant and a wanderer.
Released, I come back by a never-taken road.

–Czeslaw Milosz; This, 2000