Johannes Bobrowski: Night-Swallows

I

Cold,

the pierced air,

the black and the white, light, speaking

on routes of birds. The evening, its

bull-horn

aslant in the fire-smoke on the

horizon. You saw

the fish rise, as the waters

clashed, you took your hand

from my eyes, blackness flew

round us and without wing

and without cry.

II

We breathed,

the roof on my shoulder

was light and like a rain

skyless

the needles strewn in the sand,

night-swallows, souls,

where shadow was,

thick on the earth,

cold.

Tr. Ruth & Mathew Mead. A poem from the German Baltic. D.H. Lawrence also wrote of swallows in the gloom: "Look up, and you see things flying / Between the day and the night; / Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together." Lawrence's swallows turn out to be bats; is that also what Bobrowski is seeing?