Sophia Parnok
Through a Window-Light

With both knees pressed down on the still,
Mouth fixed like a fish’s to the pane,
I breathe, ant then breathe in again:
So, clinging to life, a body will
Suck from a greyish sack: so the heart bounds
Insistently: it’s time, it’s time to go!
The firmament is heavy on the ground,
The night has turned a dirty grey like snow,
Grey like this cushion filled with oxygen.

But I’m not dying yet: I’m still
Stubborn. I think. And now again
The bullying magic syllable
Demands its tribute from my life:
– The moon is ringed with rusty cloud –
And, gazing on the ordered stars,
Address the distance in these words:

«As in a steam-bath dirt evaporates
From sweaty skin, so now above the soil
Dark thoughts and septic secrets, petty hates
Rise in a miasma dense and foul.
And though the window’s wide for air
I none the less choke on despair.
Strange, don’t you think? Ills of all kinds
Are treatable; sarcoma, age’s slow decline,
Sclerosis… But find the place
What might slow down the germ of evil’s race!
Kneeling, like this, I’d crawl down rutted lanes
Down cratered city streets, if I could go…
Go where? Where to? God only knows!
Perhaps to a hermitage somewhere,
Repent my sins in tears and prayer –
Where is Zozima, faith’s defender,
Or is the world without end ended?»

It’s light. The houses in the dawn
Are bare and thoughtful: high above the roofs
The Burning Bush church dome and cross
Give off a flat amnd meagre glint;
And somewhere in the West, in Paris,
in Rome or Hamburg – who cares where?
Pressing against the pane for air,
Forcing its sour slops past the larynx,
Breathing with last reserves of strength,
Another stands and weeps and thinks:
Not Red, White, Black: a woman or a man,
A human being and not a citizen,
Like me, perhaps: someone whose life now ebbs
In stagnancy, and not in happeness. 

Translated by Diana Lewis Burgin