Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
LXE Oct 2016
From the smoke where all are the same, come back.

Tread the time and war observation deck,
Scan the flat lens of summer off it.
Porcelain caps flinch asudden to flick the ash
And a washing wave, fading in its splash,
Rolls the skull of Oleg the Prophet.

Where ebbs are sipping a mix of bricks,
By the sunken town and ruptured bridge,
Pull the net of the briefly known.
It's the truth laid bare that makes us crease,
It is not a stone we shall squeeze but cheese,
But compress it to strength of stone.

Wind is carrying tire hiss from the dam.
Not by prompt of age we'll replay for them,
For all those who lost before us.
Throbs of catfish under the clouded stream;
Meet the cold light, meet the anxious dream,
Meet the end of the shielding forest.

A yacht in the spyglass is changing course.
Kitchen gas is twinkling at dormant shores,
Kind of early to us the older...
Sunset touches scatter the soft relief
Of the amber shine at a Baltic cliff
And the tan of a pine tree shoulder.
A self-translation.
Original/Russian: www.stihi.ru/2006/05/28-1977
In lieu of a footnote: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_of_Novgorod
LXE Oct 2016
Marginal summer's leading the wiggy stream.
I feel tomato juice on my skin
touching the buzzing string.

Impossible to the clowns of Taste,
invisible to the goddess of Waste,
invoked against,

who are you, echoing in the rocks,
calm as a heavy raindrop,
too free to hurry,
too loving yourself to stop?

Fingers never complete the needle's path.
Ice and honey; who needs the middle part?
(I don't quite get why the "seed" submission is not added automatically, but more freedom of choice is okay.)

— The End —