To a Saxon Poet - by Jorge Borges

The snowfalls of Northumbria have known

and have forgotten the imprint of your feet,

and numberless are the suns that now have set

between your time and mine, my ghostly kinsman.

Slow in the growing shadows you would fashion

metaphors of swords on the great seas

and of the horror lurking in the pine trees

and of the loneliness the days brought in.

Where can your features and your name be found?

These are things buried in oblivion.

Now I shall never know how it must have been

for you, as a living man who walked his ground.

Exiled, you wandered through your lonely ways.

Now you live only in your iron lays.

Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Alastair Reid (1968)

from http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1462609.ece