The old woman who ate cabbage everyday
with roasted bread crumbs,
a matron in the backyard
—most finicky and industrious—
makes bobbin-lace.
The one next-door lost her daughter,
little Eve,
who drowned in the Sava.
At night another neighbor chats to her man
who is no more,
by day she knits
mittens for winter.
Her son brings out a chair for the weak
almost blind one to sit in the sun,
while two others in the wash house
are splashing the whites in wooden pails.
One is nicknamed Sprightly:
from constant smiling—untold smiles
and cares—at times
the bones in her jaw strain
with a crack.
Translated from the Slovene by Miriam Drev
Miriam Drev is a poet, novelist, literary translator from English and German, as well as a literary critic and publicist born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2022 her sixth book of poems Ancestral Healing was published, receiving the Veronika Award (Veronikina nagrada) in 2023, for the best Slovenian poetry collection of the year. Her poems have been translated into many languages and are published in several anthologies of Slovene poetry as well as in literary magazines abroad. She lives as an independent writer and translator in Ljubljana.
