Your flowers, akin, finally, to the arranging hands
(girl’s hands from times before and now),
laid out on the garden table, often end to end,
your strength ebbing, gently wounded,

waiting for the water that might retrieve you
from an encroaching death—, and now
raised up again between the vivifying poles
of feeling fingers, which minister

more potently than you had dreamt, light ones,
as you find yourselves suddenly in the vase,
slowly cooling, and giving off the warmth of girls

like confessions, like sad fatiguing sins
incurred in being plucked, and relating you
again to those whose fate, like yours, is blooming. 

trans. Edward Snow