Heaven's Hardness Poem by Monika Rinck

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock. A half world of blue light.
Is it air or wall? Mute birds, decoy thrushes, nay sparrows,
captured in resin and hardener, cast in see-through cubes.
Makes you want to cry. Or chirrup and hop in lieu of bird.
But a heavy sleep lies over you still and only your dream
knows of the others. It thinks for you. As in: What's a cabinet?
To purposefully place something inside, with sure swift hand.
Because it belongs there, an inroad, such a perfect fit, you shiver.
Now you lie awake in your tent of money, want to pay for everything.
Stay here, await the wall's ending. Adorn the day's edges
with slumber, no, worse than that, plait kitsch into your locks.
But look, vulnerable life in the morning, surely that's not nothing!
No wrong word, get up, look out the window, how a half world
of blue light brightens. There! An aurora moth lands, quivers, explodes.

Translated by Nicholas Grindell