O little root of a dream you hold me here undermined by blood, no longer visible to anyone, property of death. Curve a face that there may be speech, of earth, of ardor, of things with eyes, even here, where you read me blind, even here, where you refute me, to the letter.

Reproduced from The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology: Selections from the 2001 Shortlist, published by House of Anansi Press. Originally from Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan. Copyright © 2000 by translators Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.

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Poems by This Author

Death Fugue by Paul Celan Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime Fugue of Death by Paul Celan Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall

Further Reading

Related Poems Tender Buttons [A Little Called Pauline] by Gertrude Stein O by Mary Sidney Herbert Dreams Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake] by Christina Rossetti The Book of a Thousand Eyes [A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding] by Lyn Hejinian A Bedtime Story For Mr. Lamb by Arthur Nevis A Book Said Dream and I Do by Barbara Ras A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe Bedside by William Olsen Counting by Douglas Goetsch Cradle Song by William Blake Darkness by George Gordon Byron Dear Tiara by Sean Thomas Dougherty Dream In Which I Meet Myself by Lynn Emanuel Dream of the Evil Servant by Reetika Vazirani Dream Song 1 by John Berryman Dream Variations by Langston Hughes Dreaming About My Father by Ed Ochester Flying by Sarah Arvio Grasshopper by Ron Padgett He Dreams of Falling by Ruth Ellen Kocher His Heart by Caroline Knox I am Like a Desert Owl, an Owl Among the Ruins by Noelle Kocot I Might Have Dreamed This by Kirsten Dierking it was a dream by Lucille Clifton Japanese Lullaby by Eugene Field Kristin's Dream In November by Bernadette Mayer Last by Maxine Scates Lullaby of an Infant Chief by Sir Walter Scott Making the Bed by Burt Kimmelman Nocturne by Wayne Miller Our eunuch dreams by Dylan Thomas Prologue of the Earthly Paradise by William Morris Raven's Last Dream by Red Hawk Scarecrow on Fire by Dean Young The Dream of the Just by Dana Gelinas The Good-Morrow by John Donne The House by Richard Wilbur The Land of Nod by Robert Louis Stevenson The Republic of Dreams by Michael Palmer The Sandman by Margaret Thomson Janvier The Sleepers by Walt Whitman The Song in the Dream by Saskia Hamilton The Tower by W. B. Yeats Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood Wynken, Blynken, and Nod by Eugene Field Poems for Times of Turmoil 4/30/92 for rodney king by Lucille Clifton blessing the boats by Lucille Clifton Chaplinesque by Hart Crane Fifteen Years of Darkness by Liu Xiaobo In a Country by Larry Levis O Me! O Life! by Walt Whitman Poet's Work by Lorine Niedecker Recession by Sydney Lea The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less by Gerard Manley Hopkins Thing by Rae Armantrout