Snow, in the light grayness after snowfall
I heard the child murmuring rhymes and halfwords.

It was a language from a stranger’s mouth,
lighter than ours, more gentle, falling like snow.

In lovers’ faces for a helpless moment
there’s a glimpse of something, before they know they love

and change everything back to what it was.
When glass breaks you hear a special sound

and cracks run through frozen lakes,
no bird flies so swiftly.

I cannot count the dawns I’ve seen, and none
was matched by the day that followed.

It goes by. It doesn’t wait. The crack runs.

But in the light gray, the indefinite, there we could live.
You know the look of snow when it’s just fallen.

Lars Gustafsson, “Snow”, translated by Christopher Middleton, in The Stillness of the World Before Bach: New Selected Poems