Translated from the German by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

That’s us.
standing by the parked car,
at the entrance to the trails.

A three-day hike.
In clothes like nature children.

Our faces smooth here,
but the return will find us
bold

They’ll ask us how it went.
and we’ll say
we found a cave
and painted it with ashes, blood, and dirt.

And we happened to sight an extinct wild ox
and would have taken it down of course, only its horns
were so big, it wouldn’t have fit in the trunk.

Martin Strauss (b. 1959) is regarded in Germany as a promising new talent. He lives in Echterdingen/Stuttgart. (2000)

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is a translator of contemporary German poetry and writing. Her translations have appeared in journals including AGNI, Slope, and Seneca Review. (2010)