Текст песни: The Night of My First Breath + перевод

On the night of my first breath in a delivery room

at Allegheny County General Hospital, my birth father

whom I will never meet is asleep on a bus

disappearing into the mid-west. His name is Frank

Houser. His jacket is crumpled between the side

of his face and the window. It is the 29th

of December, but he dreams rain coming down

so hard, long strands strike the glass as if to shatter it.

My father’s hands are twitching in his lap

and when he looks down a sparrow is nesting

as if in the crook of a tree. Warmth like joy

fills my father’s body because

so delicate a creature has chosen him for safety.

He lightly strokes with the tip of a finger

the small brown head. The bird begins singing

into the darkness of the bus. Its high, sweet trilling

goes out among the sleeping passengers,

drawing each breath into its praise. My father

knows he is as much this song

as anything else in his life. When he looks outside

the rain has subsided into a blazing mist

lit red by the furnaces of steel mills along the river.

Upwards through the mist, against the darkness,

black smoke over the city like the sparrow’s notes,

traveling through my father’s hands into the night

of this place that he is leaving. When he looks down again

his lap is empty. A woman nudges him awake

as the bus pulls into the Cleveland terminal.

Piles of plowed snow are crusted black

beneath the white lights of the empty parking lot.

He stares out the window, trying to remember

what he was dreaming. He is asked if he is getting off here

and he says no, he has much further to go.

Перевод песни The Night of My First Breath