A moon gate in my wall: собрание стихотворений

Little dead children, candles in their eyes,
uprooting earth, and clanging through staid skies,
remembering their ermine-mantled days,
all guillotined too soon,
dance on the lawn
where night dreams spawn
unmindful of the gaze
of the thick-skulled mongol cheek-boned moon.
Dance, slithering sprites
in this transparent trance
through all your promised perfumed nights
with well-earned mirth
which sly time pilfered on your withering earth!
Dance in the tear-soaked grass
dangling each tinkling somewhere-living heart
as void eyes dart
to where the stolid unbelieving old
grow by the snarling oak roots in a silent mold
buried en masse.
Disdain and disregard the sod-bound throng.
There is a song
composed about you and your life goes on
dancing long nights upon a moonstained lawn.

30 Oct. 1958

532. «Suddenly, I'm awake…»

Suddenly, I'm awake —
now, when my heart is sagging
and when my death, set for the take,
creaks round the nearest hill in her sure wagon.

Quite unexpectedly, the sky blows warm

as when cold day
breathes sudden fire instead
after a powerful and all-uprooting storm
risen from its day bed.

And as I stand

groping and reaching with my lips and hand,
mouth open in an agony of wanting
to fling long smouldering words that have been haunting
my loosely used, oh, many-wasted lips,
— I see the sun that dips
into the catchall of horizon and I flay
the sunless air to hold the night at bay
and rise and leave
the rock I stand on as I reach the eave
of the lowering, blackening sky above my head —
and I am dead.

30 Oct. 1958

533. Lot's Wife [238]