SAINT-PETERSBURG
reborn on the banks of the Neva. But this is only the forerunner, the prelude
to social realism that immured alive in the history millions of fates
for centuries. The periodic table, all the creative elements – all
the enemies, not enough cells, and no empty seats at all, everything is flooded
with blood.
AMSTERDAM
the needle, hallucinations on weekdays, love in the windows, a parody
for the procreation. And not far from in the depth, no, on the surface
of history, Dutch painting, Van Gogh and Anne Frank’s surprise,
written under the dictation of a living in her house spider named
swastika of fascism.
KIEV
Demonic time. Messengers of happiness with unpretentious
truth invade into the life of politically well-fed, half-mendicant
and half-rich motherland, separated from the common sense, from
the foundations of being. How many wars, pogroms and famines should
we still overcome. Endless chorus of exhausted, dead,
humiliated by the historical passion of miseries is singing silent songs
over the country in the looking glass of heaven. For whom?
Is it really given to hear them? Sensitive hearing – it’s an anxiety of
the heart, the relentless memory of epochs, it is the pain that lives
at the native threshold and which we don’t allow to come into our house.
2008
KIEV
each other, familiar troubles, let’s meet for breakfast
in the homely café opposite the after-dinner war.
Guernica is already walking along the pavements of dreams
embracing nonsense, and pain as salt, whiter than the truth,
sounds like a heartbeat on the anvil of silence.
Songs finished and became deaf, over the migratory sloboda
a flock of addresses is circling, where nobody will come back to,
and the originals of life today are not in the museums of the world,
but here, in the winter streets and squares. Time is going gray
in the eyes, and we have grown old of happiness. Spirit of
freedom asks for help and reflects by the echo in the eyes of
tired peacekeepers like the cathedral of fiery passions.
2014
JERUSALEM
Chaotically and irreconcilably quiet. Last year’s snow seemed a mane,
but no one came to collect it. They thought, Saturday. They were mistaken.
It’s time to wear a talliet. Fear seems an inconspicuous person for
tourists. All in their hands, and even the fairy-tales of unadjusted to
the spiritual life guides. It’s hard to see the rivers, flowing with milk and honey.
And the Glory Cloud that brought people out of Egypt, reminds
a cotton candy, I don’t remember, who of townspeople said.
TEL AVIV
that grows on the way, when you’re immersed into the space
of streets, into the night mess of lights, into the stream of people’s longing,
that moves towards the time, its frozen forms, that have gained
on this patch of land their second home of the unfulfilled love
to the east. The skyscrapers moved from the emigrant distances of the paradise,
orphaned teenagers, they also didn’t find happiness under the sky,
thunderstruck by the intifada. Across the road there is a seedy cafe, and pies with
poppy seeds and feigelach buns, and this life, as a continuation of the dream,
and grandmother, so quiet, earthly, from the far Ukraine, where
all were alive. It’s time for me to go to the Philharmonic for the memory evening
of murdered, where the requiem will sound.