Sophia Parnok
Out the Window

Kneeling on the hard window sill
And thrust out the window – a gaping fish mouth!
A breath…a breath of air…Like a living corpse
Who sucks life from a gray oxygen bag,
And whose heart thumps: time to go! time to go!
And sky’s heavy arch weighs on the earth,
And the whitish night is as gray
As the gray balloon of oxygen…

But I am not dying. I am still
Holding on. I can think. And once again
The ardently demanding word
Casts its spell over my life.
I thrust my head out the window
And look up – at the starry attire,
The reddish ring around the moon –
And I speak, to no one, into space:

“Like a bathhouse the world’s got so damn stuffy
From the vapors of dirty bodies, impending dark thoughts,
Rotten secrets, irreparable deeds,
That even if you open the window wide,
There’s no air for a despairing soul to breathe!..
Isn’t it strange? We treat all diseases:
Sarcoma, and sclerosis, and old age… But
The world still has no clinics where people
Can be cured of the streptococci of evil.
That’s why I would crawl on my hands and knees
Over highway potholes, over crushed stone
On wilderness roads – where? God knows where!
To some forsaken monastery deep in the woods,
And I’d beg forgiveness and intercession –
I’d entreat with tears and prayer… If only
I knew where they were, the protectors, Zosimas,
And if the eternal flame still burns..”

It’s getting light. At dawn the buildings are
Denuded and so pensive. Above the roof tops
Faintly glimmer the cupola and cross
Of the Church of the Burning Bush…
And somewhere in the West, in Paris,
In Turin, in Hamburg – does it matter where? Someone
Like me, her head thrust out a stuffy window,
Breathing the same poisonous swill,
And using all her strength just to take a breath,
Someone stands, and thinks, and weeps,
Not a white, and not a red, and not a black,
Not a citizen, but simply a human being,
Like me, perhaps, too un-adroitly
And sadly living out her life.

Translated by Diana Lewis Burgin