Barely swaying
At a point where the winds cross,
Light birds hung
Like icon lamps amid the heavens.
Their tiny telescopic eyes
Peered straight down.
People crawled like bed-bugs,
And brooks meandered.
A mouse ran across a field,
And a bird pounced on it.
The little corpse, instantly disfigured,
Was dragged into the reeds.
And sitting there, the bird
Tore the mouse with its fingers,
And from its mouth a stream of water
Flowed onto the ground.
And shifting the tiny telescopes
Of its dimmed eyes,
The bird thought. A tarantas
Came rolling over the hill.
I was sitting in that tarantas,
As it sped across the field,
And my own wretched fate
Weighed on my heart as well.
Колыхаясь еле-еле
Всем ветрам наперерез,
Птицы легкие висели,
Как лампады средь небес.
Их глаза, как телескопики,
Смотрели прямо вниз.
Люди ползали, как клопики,
Источники вились.
Мышь бежала возле пашен,
Птица падала на мышь.
Трупик, вмиг обезображен,
Убираем был в камыш.
В камышах сидела птица,
Мышку пальцами рвала,
Изо рта ее водица
Струйкой на землю текла.
И сдвигая телескопики
Своих потухших глаз,
Птица думала. На холмике
Катился тарантас.
Тарантас бежал по полю,
В тарантасе я сидел
И своих несчастий долю
Тоже на сердце имел.
«Take — for the sake of joy — out of my palms / a little sunlight and a little honey, / as we were told to by Persephone’s bees. You can’t untie a boat that isn’t moored, / nor can you hear a shadow shod in fur, / nor — in this dense life — overpower fear. The only thing that...»
«The flowers say good-bye to me, / They bend their heads and bow low down / Which means that I will never see / Her lovely face and my home town. / / Well, that"s the way it is, my love! / I saw them all in habitation, / I take this deathly trepidation / For tender feeling, still a...»
«I will not be wandering about / Trampling goosefoot in the bushes any more; / And I know you"ll never come around / In my dreams, oat-haired, as before. / / You were tender beautiful and fair, / Berry juice upon your skin, so light. / You resembled rosy sunset glare, / And, like...»
«in memory of Glina Straovoitova That’s how it was: I turned my sickroom gazes / on the yard outside the ward, as though on groves / or open fields. I tried to write ‘quite simply’: / as it turned out, the impediment was this: my mind was racked, tortured by constant fretting / about ...»