from  An Essay Concerning Solitude

Waking at 3 a.m. is becoming an art;
an art, or gift, delivered through sleep and quiet,

parcels of snow and sky
from another country,

lights from a childhood that feels
so recent, we might not have aged at all.

Give us this day, we say, and continue
moving the pieces, trying to puzzle it out,

a picture of fog, or stars, through an open window,
hares in the long grass, mice in the folds of the yard,

the wisp of sun unfurling from a wall
that matches us

for warmth and transience,
the fabric of a life, asleep and waking,

finding and losing its way
in the house of the echo.

John Burnside

[ permission granted by the author ]

No one has taken away anything—–
there is a sweetness for me in being apart.
I kiss you now across the many
hundreds of miles that separate us.

I know: our gifts are unequal, which is
why my voice is—–quiet, for the first time.
What can my untutored verse
matter to you, a young Derzhavin?

For your terrible flight I give you blessing.
Fly, then, young eagle! You
have stared into the sun, without blinking.
Can my young gaze be too heavy for you?

No one has ever stared more
tenderly or more fixedly after you…
I kiss you—–across hundreds of
separating years.

(1916)

Marina Tsvetayeva, Selected Poems , trans. Elaine Feinstein (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 3–4.

These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
  Are but the varied God. The rolling year
  Is full of thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
  Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love.
  Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;
  Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles;
  And every sense and every heart is joy.
  Then comes thy glory in the Summer months,
  With light and heat refulgent. Then thy sun
  Shoots full perfection through the swelling year
  And oft thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks,
  And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve,
  By brooks and groves, in hollow-whispering gales.
  A yellow-floating pomp, thy bounty shines
  In Autumn unconfined. Thrown from thy lap,
  Profuse o'er nature, falls the lucid shower
  Of beamy fruits; and, in a radiant stream,
  Into the stores of sterile Winter pours.
  In winter awful thou! with clouds and storms
  Around thee thrown--tempest o'er tempest rolled.
  Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing
  Riding sublime, thou bidst the world adore,
  And humblest nature with thy northern blast.

- Thomson