Already there are already plants
already they are blooming
Then it’s our turn
Then their’s again
We’ve stopped in
only for a moment
Flowers are older than us
It’s not youth but the speed of plants
that confuses us
Unmoving green
outruns the reds
of our blood
If we meet
it will be here
it will be now
between the green
and the green
Jennifer Grotz’s most recent book of poems is Window Left Open (Graywolf Press). She is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Piotr Sommer is the author of Continued (Wesleyan University Press) and Overdoing It (Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press). His collected poems, Po Ciemku Też, (Also In The Dark) appeared in Poland in 2013.
Jerzy Ficowski (1924-2006) was a poet, songwriter, and scholar on the Polish Roma population as well as the writer-artist Bruno Schulz. Recent translations of Ficowski’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and Ploughshares.