EN
Once I sat on a branch
of an old, spreading linden tree;
I gazed up at the sky;
and watched the swallows,
as they cut through the cool air up there
with their nimble wings.
I sat on a linden branch,
saturated with the colors of all the leaves,
wheat stalks, even boulders,
knowing nothing of the origins of growth,
and the branch beneath me trembled.
A hundred years have already passed.
A hundred strange years
for whose past we grew.
Today I hear reporters daily,
as they write their essays
from the surface of alien planets
of distant, unknown worlds,
but are they really so foreign?
Or, under the influence of versifiers,
do they reflect, as on the surface of a lake,
cracked rocks?
Or perhaps these paparazzi,
do they become fantasists overnight?
Back then,
a hundred years ago, I only sensed
that a butterfly always emerges
from the depths of a small chrysalis.
That a freshwater pearl mussel lives in a river. —
That the world is blue from a distance
— I only dreamed of that.
And the branch beneath me snapped
and killed the boy.
Thanks to Newton, we now know why.
