We crossed the border. We tore flowers in someone else’s fields . . .

We crossed the border. We tore flowers in someone else’s fields,
quietly uttering the words of a first heard language,
we spent the night under the bare sky, and our homeland in our dreams
appeared less and less, and, nearly always its wintry
landscapes — harsh, grand places,
are marked with the stamp of immutability. We forgot
the rare voices of its birds, the scent of home, and this 
ability seemed appropriate, rather than a hindrance.
The land was chosen by us already as our own.
The rapture from living here reached its apogee.
But sometimes in innocent conversations the name of
a strange beggar from Ithaca, the incomprehensible Odysseus, disconcerted us.

We crossed the border. We tore flowers in someone else’s fields . . .