Paul Celan, Fadensonnen*
My father and his brothers
hunt pheasants
through a fine October day, keeping one row of corn,
golden stubble, between them, sweeping the fields
of the homesteaders. Because
it is 1946, the country
is at peace, a minister from Princeton takes
the train to South Dakota, to their farms
to listen to their speech,
low German,
a Dutch inflection, the quiet mark of allegiance
to the low countries, now that the borders
are no longer terrible.
When the evening light
becomes the fast falling night, the time
of long shadows, he asks for a farmhouse,
a phone, and because something
is abiding
in those fields he has not seen, calls the city
to say that he has been unavoidably detained.
—Jane Hoogestraat,
AM’82, PhD’89
Hoogestraat, a professor
of English and gender studies at Southwest State University
in Springfield, Missouri, has published work in Poetry,
Southern Review, DoubleTake, Slant, High Plains Literary
Review, Yarrow, and South Dakota Review.
*above the grey-black
wilderness.
TRANSLATION
OF THE ABOVE
A tree-
high thought
tunes into lights pitch: there are
still songs to be sung on the other side
of mankind.
Paul Celan, Thread
Suns
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