Elizabeth Jennings - Song at the Beginning of Autumn 汉译

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In smells. All looks like summer still;

Colours are quite unchanged, the air

On green and white serenely thrives.

Heavy the trees with growth and full

The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within

A child’s cake would understand

The ambiguity of this—

Summer still raging while a thin

Column of smoke stirs from the land

Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind

Of rich nostalgia. We give names—

Autumn and summer, winter, spring—

As though to unfasten from the mind

Our moods and give them outward forms.

We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against

My will to a childhood where

Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;

I lean against my window fenced

From evocations in the air.

When I said autumn, autumn broke.