Let’s See…
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
I drink two coffees on the go,
hurrying to my work in the office,
hurrying to dissolve –
a terminator runs happily
into the shimmering sea of acid.
The sunrise against the background of blue-green disheveled snakes.
Maybe I should slow down,
push a rose through a bike wheel,
pat on its head the squirrel in the wheel– hey, you, stop it!
Maybe I should learn to be slow.
Slow like rocks that learn to breathe millenniums in,
and breathe out eagle nests that smell of musty bones,
of wet, brown-rusty feathers.
Everything that sounds faster than a classical tune is killing me,
erasing me,
and life walks forward, stepping on our heads like a polite elephant,
but I’m slowing down,
I’m in my lazy phase.
Poetry is one hundred thousand times less popular than
your new manicure,
or an iPhone perfect like hell.
But let’s see, let’s see, let’s see…
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The Majestic Moment of Sunset
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
The majestic moment of sunset.
An audience with the Creator goes on,
to the stern, iridescent silence by J.S. Bach,
even though His chair is empty,
and the desk made of clouds is empty as well.
Pink pulsars. Everyone can meet head-on
a pink humongous squid in the middle of a lake.
And still, still,
I’m not just a simple lump of clay, or a lean uranium alloy,
or a biological toy, or a sentient figurine, or
a flower pot for growing dandelions of consciousness.
The sunset is not made for the eyes of stupid monkeys.
Down there, in the space behind the eyes,
there is something promising,
and you say to yourself: what if I’m so lucky
that God does exist?
But no, it’s just an ordinary sunset,
and it sees us as tiny butterflies
or flies in a lamp.
You can’t explain what life is to the lethal Sun.
To understand it, the Sun should fall in love just once,
should simplify itself into
an orange crayon blob in my daughter’s album —
and let them always live in happiness: she, and mum, and dad…
Both poems translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian.
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About the Author
Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Pinch, Salamander, Willow Springs, Grub Street, Magma Poetry and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. Member of PEN America. Visit Dmitry’s entry in the Poets & Writers Directory.