The Buddha Rat

A Leaf

—Bronislaw Maj

(trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass)

A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among the other leaves, no one saw what I did.
I am the only one.