A Tale About Hedgehogs

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

You wrote to me about a tame pet hedgehog

who fell in love with a scrubbing brush.

Shut inside four walls he’d found that special someone

like him and not like him, otherness and kinship.

How hard he pattered around it before he understood

that otherness has an advantage that cannot be overcome.

And how hard we’ve been pattering around each other,

at first like wild hedgehogs mutually enthralled,

later so often incensed that the other

is deaf as a thing to us. Or else we’re the ones who

are going deaf, turning to wood. Always running away.

Unless something pricks us: that’s my real hedgehog

with whom I want to keep dodging, however helplessly,

between what’s the same and what’s different about us.