Nina Cassian

That woman
she has tigers in her poems

perhaps she is angry
like Caesar missing his bus

or gentler like
a cloud passing
through the last remnants of a sunset

she is gone now
she was old

I read her poems on the way to a bank
it was being robbed
of coins in burlap sacks
held by masked tigers
with white shiny teeth

I read her poems
to a new born
who cried for the tigers
who went hungry in the jungles of New York

I read her poems
to a dying tree
who swallowed them whole
and that is the last I’ve heard of them