Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger

trans. by Carlie Hoffman

Late Afternoon

Long shadows fall on the lighted path

and the sun sends the goodbye of final warmth

and even the bird’s veiled chirp is

stealing from silence.

People ten paces away

seem to come from different worlds

and you almost want to scold the withered leaves

as they rustle and disturb the sun’s last rays.

You want to hear the violets grow.

April 16, 1940

Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Her awards include a 92Y/Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, Boston Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. 

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was a German-speaking, Jewish poet from Bukovina. On December 16, 1942, she died of typhus in the Nazi SS labor camp Michailowka in Ukraine. She was eighteen years old. Selma is the author of Blütenlese, a collection of poems that, with the dedication and care of her contemporaries, miraculously survived the war.