Monastery in the Hills (Monk's Song) - Dato Barbakadze

Each morning I fetch water from a hidden spring
and quietly watch the changing clouds.
I do not know if I will see another winter
but I am still happy, surrounded by mountains and green places
where so many mortals—so many weak ones—live.
I do not think about the pines because they're me.
Each time they think of me,
I stop wondering why the white walls of my retreat
do not look like snow on the bamboo fence.
The paths of fishermen and woodcutters intertwine
and even after a hundred years I would not want to untangle them
Nor am I tired by memories of a past I never had
Nor do I believe my prayers are heard by
a blue deer, kneeling, whose quiet breathing I can almost touch fully, with my body.
I wonder where Sesson is now.
These plum branches await only night and the moon
to startle my long ago dreams
and scatter them on these roofs and this place
numerously inhabited by clouds and forests and squirrels
and these wild geese
and the spring hidden to everyone
and that which wanders on mountain paths
and cold cruel winds and dry brush
gathered near the monastery
on which to cook beans for forty years.
Every twilight, cranes follow the wind toward my thoughts
but they do not think of me at all;
I cannot find the way home because
I have never wished to find it.
I lie on the ground like a branch
My bones are as dry as brushwood.
If they asked me, I could not tell them the name
of the woman who was with me once,
who was with me once and warmed my heart.
The rain is sleeping.
Every branch, every treetop, is a warm human soul and
(now I realize) every breath of the wind
every snow-covered leaf on the slope of a hill is like this.
I fetch water from the hidden spring.

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Dato Barbakadze (born 1966) Georgia
Translated by Lyn Coffin and Nato Alhazishvili
Source: Big Bridge