This shredded day. But it unravels further.
I'm sinking. Yet a hundred years from now
What will it matter? Who will even know?
Silence is wisdom's path to glory (so they say).
The bitch of poetry is not in heat today,
For all the males are dead or far away.
So let the Internet and wine help keep me warm.
My hopes lie in my tongues. Though now struck dumb,
I know it's «silence, till the poems will come».
Ed Pobuzhansky
Conversation
I started having conversations with my cat
And with my radio. So, Siri, tell me, friend,
What will it lead to? Cobwebbed, frail
Will I be talking to my shadow in the end?
I started having conversations with myself.
I wish it were a witty repartee, a joke.
Instead, it’s trial by combat with the truth,
A truth that does not hesitate to stab, to choke.
I started having conversations with my dad.
For years, we used to fight, to rage and rave.
But here I am: gray hair, his face – now my face,
Bawling, as I uproot the nettles on his grave.
In the morning, cold white light
Blankets all like heavy snow.
There’s my neighbor walking by;
His tracks fill with drifting glow.
“Neighbor!” I call loud and clear.
But my neighbor does not hear.
He is walking, white-haired, tired
Further, further,
Higher, higher…
“You, Russians, always complicate everything,”
Sighed the Czech poet and translator,
Shutting my book;
“Who needs rhymed poetry nowadays?
Maybe just the kids!
Today, rhymes are as incongruous
As a row of buttons on a naked body!”
I kept silent.
I was reluctant to admit
that in my childhood,
whenever I came to spend the summer
at my granny’s,
I loved to sift through
the multicolored buttons
in a tin box.
Made of mother of pearl, glass, steel,
In all shapes and colors —
to me, they seemed like a genuine
treasure!
I even wanted to filch one —
A yellow button with a star, —
In order to trade it for a slingshot…
And, when I and my friend, Sashka,
ran away to the lake,
we would come home
only at the end of the day,
when the June sun
was sinking below the horizon,
like a large red button.
Sometimes it happens like this:
You are still together.
In the morning,
You drink the stone-cold coffee,
You finish off the omelet with bacon
(That is, by the way, over-salted as usual).
But already,
Somewhere in the bedroom,
On the upper shelf of the closet,
The blue suitcase
Has impatiently clicked its lock.
Sometimes at night I cry and whimper.
But don’t you dare to howl along.
