The Kindled Fire — In the Voice of a Refugee Woman

O cold, visit the chambers of the lofty palaces,
enter the sanctuary of the towering houses,
blow upon their hearths and greet the women who tend them,
send your winds about them in playful caress —
go, and storm the palace balcony!

Hover about those who wear close-woven furs;
they do not fear you, morning or evening.
Enough that over us you brandish the sword of enmity —
we built our hut with the hand of misery,
a hut that looks like the mouth of a burrow.

No fire in the little hut, not even a spark,
only the threadbare remnants of a blanket;
our bedding holds the grown together with the small,
so we are packed like plums in the peddlers' crates —
and if I complain, I complain of my crushing lot.

Leave our hut alone, O cold — it is no fortress;
go — may your mother mourn you! — away from one estranged from her homeland.
You have frozen my body with frost and branded me
with a chill that rattles my bones and shakes me through —
that is why I named you the breaker of backs.

If I perish, who will look after my little girl?
How often I have gathered her up in my cloak;
she burrows into my lap — alas for my daughter!
From my body's warmth comes her warmth, from my heart's blood;
my body is her shelter from the cold.

You have terrified us, O cold, O cruelest of torments —
do you make war on one deprived of a warm drink!
They barred you from houses of well-appointed precincts,
so you came casting panic into the ruined house.
O cold, you are death itself, if you but knew.

O cold, you have loaded the air with tempests,
and veiled the risings of the daytime sun,
and poured out tears from the black clouds,
frozen hard by sheer cruelty; and so they contended,
my heart and your heart, over the rain-cloud:

my heart melts with it while your heart freezes,
and evil prevails, and the storms lend their aid,
and lo, the voice of the gales breaks into trilling,
and you lavish the shrouded hail — while tomorrow
comes to me in raiment of shining purity.

Does it flatter your vanity that your garment is white?
Black calamities crouch beneath your garment;
the snow scatters down and the clouds urge it on —
black on the horizon of the sky, they whiten
on the earth the face of death and of the grave.

O cold, my fire is kindled in my heart —
and God knows what the hearts conceal —
a fire, upon my life, raging like Hell itself;
would that it blazed in the heart of the hearth —
then you would roast, O cruel one, upon the embers!