War of the Beasts and the Animals

But the way it’s led by the breeze

Drawing bare branches through aerial blue waters

When I am a weary spidery little insect

Even then it’s a pity to die:

I’d rather wander on a sea of milk.

Young soldiers

In bell-bottomed trousers

Living like tree stumps along the street in spring.

Who are you, resurrected man?

Well, he says, well. You know how things are.

Body of poetry, you are strewn everywhere

Like fired plastic bullets,

That don’t decompose.

Death – the shadow at your back

Resurrection – the brightest shade of black

Up flies the word, you can’t catch it back

E

The least said the soonest.

Word is not a sparrow.

Are not five sparrows

(finches, larks and other such)

Are not five sparrows

Sold for two pennies?

Your price was higher.

You are better than many birds.

And spring is so thin, so miserably wan

Like a nurse, slippers on her bare feet,

Slipping out of theatre, into the hospital yard

For a quick smoke.

He said to me:

Lazarus, come on, let’s get outta here

Where’s the sting,

I’ll get it out,

And if there’s a splinter left in your flesh

We’ll sort it.

And this red stuff, this krasny wet

This Ding, which doesn’t have a name,

Four days now in the corpse pit

Getting stronger and stronger and stood and left.

D

He said to me: Lazarus, come here.

He led me to the banqueting house

And his banner over me was love.

And his left hand was under my head,

And with his right hand he embraced me,

And another hand was placed, as always

On my forehead.

You hold my head with care

As if it were a basket filled with preparations for a feast,

Lined with spread branches of palm,

Filled to the brim with chocolate eggs

Figs, dates, trussed quails,

Fingers of sausage.

You hold my head like a basket

Decorated with ribbons,

And freshly greened twigs

Like a pretty easter basket

And in it lies my head.

Look after it, carry it carefully:

My features trickle through the bone like water.

Put it in a sack.

Put it in a pot.

Grow basil from it.

C

A Roman girl with a pile of flaxen hair

Drawn untidily into a knot

Sitting by the circular fountain

Speaking into her mobile phone.

A man in a leather jacket

On his darkleather body

Making sketches in a notepad

In carmine graphite.

A boy in Saratov. An old woman at the cash desk.

A man selling luminous plastic flying machines.

I want to be each of these people.

I want to live with each of them.

Enter their homes like air

Enter their bodies like an Easterly

Touch their swelling nodules with my tongue

Earlobes

Sea-blue proteins

White fur from elbow to wrist

Sleep’s shadow from navel to groin

Ribs, collarbones, shoulder blades,

Indigo work overalls

Black dress with tiny white spots

All this will be unavoidably resurrected

All this will be unavoidably avoided.

B

A hand buried at Marne.

A hand buried at Narva.

A hand lying in the Galician wastes.

The ash of a hand lying nowhere.

All of this will return.

And when we go to resurrect

A whole forest of stolen digits

Defamiliarised, unrecogniseable, thrown down,

Rustling in the wind above our heads,

Coming towards the rendez-vous

Like Birnam wood to Dunsinane.

And feet, legs, one-legged legs

In rotten boots (and boots boots) –

Leaden soldiers, fallen behind their unit

Units of stone, units of cloud

All these legs standing tall at the doors of inns

And crutches, like the papal ferula

Sprouting green shoots.

And empty, naked prosthetic limbs

Dance behind the cheering crowds like dogs.

And like sacks which once contained provisions

Eaten down to the last crumb

Poetry lies superfluous on the ground.

The train moves off. The blue shutters of summerhouses

At a station. The poplars rise like ladders.

A

 De døde kan være så døde

 At ingen kan se de er til*

 so speaks poetry in Danish

 but another speaks in a woman’s voice

 another speaks in an English voice

 an American woman in an English voice

 when the woman who thought it in Danish

 is so very dead that she

 is almost invisible

 but she still exists

 …

 …

 …

 they lie like earthed-up potatoes

 they lie like forks in a drawer

 like thoughts in someone’s head

 and no one sees how

 how very much

 they are completely like us

 even more so

 alive

 alive and so very living

 you barely believe they are to be found

 (picking through carbon chains)

 and in what strange circumstances

 we think they aren’t here

 

 

 

* ‘The dead can be so dead / That no one can see they exist’ is from the poem ‘Action’ in Inger Christensen’s It, translated by Susanna Nied.

About the Author

Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). Her documentary novel In Memory of Memory (2017) won Russia’s Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale’s translation by New Directions in the US and by Fitzcarraldo in the UK in 2021. Sasha Dugdale’s English translation of a selection of her poetry, War of the Beasts and the Animals, also appeared in 2021, from Bloodaxe.

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