Should it come to this

Like yesterday’s poem I started with a poem in Russian by the young Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky and fed itinto Google translate. I’ve never seen a real translation, but doubt it looks anything like mine.

[line]

Should it come to this

In this city of bread ovens,
this stateless place of four winds,
cousin Zelda speaks the patois of yeast,
her nose twitching in sympathy with her lips.
Sometimes she sings hymns for the local pharmacopeia.

Zelda befriends buskers and priests, knows
that uncle Kurt is responsible in these parts
for the uniform distribution of clouds.
But that’s just a rumour put about by his enemies.
They claim he once made a tram mow down archbishop Schmidt
because he was carrying tomatoes in his holy pockets.
And once he danced naked on a table in front of our window.
The Guardians shot him, but not before
the state prosecutor interrogated Zelda
dipping his pen between her legs in bureaucratic zeal.

Somewhere in the annals of human misery it says
numbness disappears, silence disappears,
yet we know it lives on in us, the survivors.

And it’s like crazy not to fall, not divide
the space between busker and prosecutor.

All our words blow about in the four winds
like the feathers of raised memories.

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