Author's website Alexander Korotko

***

How can you sing
these words
at the height of glory,
don’t you see
that all our vowels
are shot through
within them?
What remains?
Only the nightmarish
raids
and tears that look
like the despair
of cranberries,
red with pain.
One more chapter
of a bloody
and deceitful life is read.
And you say
in the boiling Hell
of misfortunes,
what a happiness
after all,
that we are still alive
in the plain sight
of death itself.

Translated by Natalia Ogienko