Elizabeth Bishop (Элизабет Бишоп)
Squatter’s Children
On the unbreathing sides of hills they play, a specklike girl and boy, alone, but near a specklike house. The Sun’s suspended eye blinks casually, and then they wade gigantic waves of light and shade. A dancing yellow spot, a pup, attends them. Clouds are piling up; a storm piles up behind the house. The children play at digging holes. The ground is hard; they try to use one of their father’s tools, a mattock with a broken haft the two of them can scarcely lift. It drops and clangs. Their laughter spreads effulgence in the thunderheads, Weak flashes of inquiry direct as is the puppy’s bark. But to their little, soluble, unwarrantable ark, apparently the rain’s reply consists of echolalia, and Mother’s voice, ugly as sin, keeps calling to them to come in. Children, the threshold of the storm has slid beneath your muddy shoes; wet and beguiled, you stand among the mansions you may choose out of a bigger house than yours, whose lawfulness endures. It’s soggy documents retain your rights in rooms of falling rain.
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