Breakfast With Death Poem by Slavko Janevski

He doesn't come the way you thought
from rose-coloured glaciers
with a dead stag in his arms.

Quietly he creeps out of
the sunflowers' sparks,
his eyes are golden,
his hands those of a ploughman.

We meet like friends
on an ant's trail:
Death with a primrose in his teeth,
you with a cake under your arm.

The primrose of salamader skin
the cake of sweat and sand.

He with primrose wine
you with a mouthful of cake,
both in the jaws of time.

As you lay down together
on a bed of nettles
Death's nine larks
began a lullaby.

And the warm breezes too
fell asleep under the stone.