Between Augustus and a Barbarian
Over the high mountains,
and hot sands,
over rough rivers
and desert plains –
There was the land
that stroked fierce tears:
there were thunder and storms,
there were bisons and auroches,
locals and strangers
shed blood like water,
feeding the hungry earth.
Ovid walked here,
cursing it with a tortured throat,
it used to tell what it thought,
sowing sands with the hot words,
not waiting for the end of the world,
because it was already around
although it was not named.
O boundless Scythia
impressed into the past,
as into hardened amber.
I take a deep breath,
my words are weak and powerless
at the sight of your lands
covered in snow.
Only hieroglyphs of trees
the Lord reads at dawn
on the manuscripts of winter fields.
Boats imprisoned in ice,
with open mouths
waiting for a man to catch.
The opposite riverbank
is far as a dream of happiness,
drawing a thin line under the past,
whose unrecognizable face
is unthawing in a prickly fog,
not moving the hair-like branches of a willow.
Winter draws a third-act curtain:
the intermission is too long,
like a court sentence.
Glassy air clinks, ridiculing
hopes, that burn fingers
and believe in better times,
benevolent to provincials
and people off the lists.
Smoke from a distant hut
needles the sky with black thread –
a sign of the last connection to God,
a first moment of renaissance for a desert.
After the night blizzard
the roads are sleeping,
and the snowflakes are resting
from long-distance flights.
It is a time for the great poet:
there are no rivals or
listeners, no eavesdropping.
The cold in the hut wants to match
the cold in the streets,
pushing you out
in search of a warmer place.
You’re not a migration bird,
you will not find warm provinces.
You are an old and tired raven,
filled with bile bitterness.
You do not fly over the fence –
experience holds the wings.
You stomp the frost in the snows.
Your past is bright as the sun
over the precious Aegean Sea,
waved in the perfume fragrance of
blossom apple trees and laurel,
it smiles to you like a barbarian,
with rotten teeth.
Between the blows of the pendulum
your life is crucified.
Teach them the art of love.
Teach them, unwashed, ragged,
in the sheepskins – a wild flock.
Teach them the art of hairstyles,
stripping the shoulder for a kiss,
light and seductive gait
and winning the silk bed.
Fear of the arrow hangs in the air,
fear of fire and sudden death,
smelling like the royal mercy,
youthful orgies
and careless words,
confident in their rightfulness.
Tell them, like a hairy sheep,
with broken nails
and tousled hair,
that you are a poet,
and the empire
laid at your feet –
let them laugh.
Tell Romans – that you are innocent,
that everything is a game of words,
and a fishing bait for mass,
attracting fame like a fish.
Now the fish is ice-bound,
now the river turned into a road
across, not along,
and a barbarian rushes ahead
with your personal arrow.
Only a handful of poems
is left for you
before Augustus shoots an arrow,
flying from the Rome,
from the bow of the vagrant.
Two-faced Janus –
your own hunter,
a bow-legged Hun,
grinning with joy
and taking your sheepskins
and a family ring
with a portrait of a relative.
And the golden profile of Augustus
will laugh and laugh
in the cold Sarmatian spaces,
the eternal empire
divided between you equally.
translated from Ukrainian by Marta Kondratiuk