Punctuation is an important and cohesive device in all kinds of written discourse. Standard marks used to separate words, phrases, clauses and sentences for the purpose of cohesion. Already [2][5][1] pointed out that through punctuation marks, one can signal different information structures in written language. Regarding the translation of texts, we use such marks to identify the ends of sentences, closely related sentences or clauses, etc. This is why missing punctuation burdens the translations and forces the translator to go over the text several times to understand its meaning [10]. Understanding the uses and functions of punctuation marks, therefore, is extremely important for translators, as their purpose is to clarify the meaning of a particular construction within a text. On the other hand, modern poetry often disregarded such punctuations. Ever since Italian Futurism around 1900 spoke of the ‘parole in libertà’, i.e. the liberation of words from grammatical and syntactic limitations, modern poetry has hardly used punctuation. This lack of punctuation makes analysis, but also translation, more difficult. The only way to reconstruct this punctuation is by listening to the poems, i.e. by subsequently identifying sentence boundaries. However, this lack of punctuation can be found very often in modern and post-modern poetry, so the challenge is to recognize the phrase boundaries. We contribute in the paper an application towards the problem of identifying left-out punctuation in post-modern poetry, by proving that only a very simple type of punctuation - the semicolon - is needed to improve machine translation. This simple punctuation refers to phrase boundaries, the so-called “grammetrical units”, which Donald Wesling defined in his study “The Scissors of Meter” [11]. Such units must be identified in order to improve machine translation.