Tag: poetry

《灰色人民》

暴雲來了三春秋
已有三十待考慮；
一層一層灰色樓，
眾人板臉行走走。
紅色帝國雖廢墟，
灰色人民尋迴路。


西山同胞弄起義，
流亡武士未放棄；
四方長做冷戰場，
祖先夢想不可忘。


若咱爺爺在人間，
必定吃驚不信眼：
既然青黃旗子飄，
建國大業已得了，
灰色人民厭自由，
視咱英雄為仇寇；
蘇聯兒孫沒變異，
高舉雙手求奴役。

A Studious Cat

At the end of a grinding subway ride,

Scheduled readings like a tsunami tide,

And lectures and strivings and laptop bag

Made spirit and shoulders alike to sag;

Unlocked the door: sat you there on the floor

With a heart that hummed and eyes that implore,

And the strains that upon my mind did gnaw

Were melted away in your beaming awe.

*

No matter how high was the textbook stack,

Not patience nor passion you ever lacked;

Genius co-writer who had no thumbs,

Claiming the keyboard with your floofy tum.

*

The hard-won degrees in their frames do stay,

Though one doubts the meaning of what they say.

I sigh to recall all the twists and turns

And wonder what lessons there were to learn.

In a far-off land on a rain-soaked night,
I sit and I think by a candle’s light

Of the fortune to know your angel’s spark

That glowed beside me through the cold and dark.

Orphans of the Horde

Skin burnished brazen by the wind and sun,

Eyes steeled upon a mighty task undone,

Though his belly bulges like the failing tiles

Upon the Brezhnevka’s crumbling concrete piles.

His forebears came in a hungry season

To bring the ways of Science and Reason;

With atom’s power they raced to space

And – conquerors – took pride of place.

Wherefore, he wonders, this ingratitude?

Why secretly did scheme and brood

Peasant and Pan, who both yet spurned

The blessings his kin for them had earned!

He was strong with life when sudden died

The World born in a frenzied tide

Of steel-souled Plans and burning blood;

Time whistled past, his folk lost in the flood.

Old, he is, but not yet spent,

With no worries as to work or rent:

The dream inside could never fade

Nor history’s march by experiments stayed.

His cottage plays host for new-come brothers,

Hidden from cops and nosy grandmothers;

A hunter now, with too much ammo to carry –

One wonders if deer or ducks are truly his quarry…

*

Smile broad and bright as the Arctic moon,

Locks butter gold as the sun at high noon;

Eastern eyes in anguish betray

A life becalmed at dawn of day.

A princess she’d have been – so her father said –

And thus before Uncle Stalin was dead

For their glorious service were gifted for free

The flat and the GAZ, and trips to the sea.

Alas, all she wears is fake and chintz;

Insta and Twitter caught no foreign prince.

The GAZ sits rusting, a garden for weeds,

And in the flat fungi and rodents breed.

Who was it who stole her rightful crown –

The future she was born to own?

She sought her parents and the internet

Who told her ‘twas indeed a frightful set:

Of course, there was Washington and the Vatican,

The Zionists and Free Masons,

And the Banderites who got away

And plotted to return someday…

Neither hammer nor sickle would mar her hand,

But they fed her hope in the Promised Land,

Despite what its reality lacked

Amid the darkening forest of red and black.

Tech-savvy, with looks to lure,

She keeps her profiles naughty and her conscience pure.

She has a second mobile – and a third and a fourth –

To show her Moscow boyfriends what a Shahed’s flight is worth.

Hers is the visage that guides the missile-ships,

And no word – in Uke – shall leave her plastic lips,

For, amid the rubble, smoke and sorrow

She foresees the sunrise of a Muscovite tomorrow.

《Сито》

На степовому зійшли перші сніги, білий килим на полі бою

На самоті я блукаю містом, для почуття — ще шукаю

Людська ріка, кругом тихо; Ще в серці, не спокіно.

Війна, правда, чудове решето;

їх і нас; порожній і правдивий — розділяє чисто.

Геополітика, міркування — негайно відкинь їх від мене,

Тільки бажаю, щоб на світі була одна “знає себе.”

Серце усвідомило, i хочу тримати

Нaжаль, скарб — вже експортували…

《Minivans》

Born it was, in the Reagan years, a transport innovation;

The sluggish box most popular

‘Mid the housewives of the nation.

*

Waiting in ranks for our regiments –

Like parrots or swarming monkeys –

As we fled scholastic prisonment.

*

Laden with bags and boxes, canoe on rooftop tossed,

Upon some holiday voyage –

Delights, in later ages lost.

*

A taxi for the hockey team

And sticks and skates and grub to nosh;

What, to the driver, did all those errands seem?

*

A steed safe and sturdy, but without pretense;

Choice carriage of suburban moms

Zealous, fretful, yet full of sense.

*

How silly now seem the petty fears

That wracked our minds in yonder years;

An era’s symbols: quite mundane,

And yet we’d wish them all come back again.

“關閉我們的天空”

二月爆發侵略戰，
歐聯富豪出冷汗
揮著藍黃自由旗，
國際論壇多爭議。
烏軍士兵太勇武，
打到俄國難進入；
但是俄人多狡猾，
火箭日夜來轟炸。
我國總統要外援，
跪求西方導彈盾。
嘆息今天德、法、意
不如祖先滿志氣；
一群現代大懦夫，
男兒樣子全空虛；
只要咱們守前線，
柏林巴黎睡安穩：
烏克蘭女最美麗，
俄國煤氣最便宜。

Soborna Street Bridge

On the edge of winter the hornbeams’ relict leaves

Tinkle like golden bells amid the breeze;

A happy sigh for the peaceful sky,

As on Soborna Bridge the cars flow bustling by.

The refugees already half returned;

Surprised at seeing our People spurned,

An epiphany:

Their paradise was not reality.

Along the streetside, there’s smiling face galore,

As if, true there’s war, savouring life more:

The situation makes the heart’s eye see clearly why

Not again to let greed

And selfishness lead

Us to Heaven’s Will defy.

“Allies”

Welcomed ‘warmly,’ twice in half a year,

The soul revealed as the mask is slipping clear;

Winter glistening upon the morning ground,

The swagger glimpsed in summer nowhere to be found.

Their money to Moscow, for scheming, can’t be paid,

Leaving the EUnuchs fretting the falling centigrade.

On the fields and city streets our People’s blood did flow,

While thirty times their love for us they sent unto our Foe.

Once, they were Men, who besides our Didos stood

And held the craven Bolsheviks as long as heroes could.

Soon they will bid us sign a paper, “for the Greater Good,”

As their green-mad Citizens scrounge for coal and wood;

They, who, in Eighty-Nine, cried that their land be whole,

Will order us to smiling cede what Putin’s Hordes have stole,

And they will not see the contradiction,

Demigods in their own self-written fiction.

Welfare, apartments, tons of thankless toil –

Proximity to glamour, on another master’s soil:

As an offer to one’s’ subjects, it’s really much the same

As Khrushchev and his Commissars, rebuilding, did proclaim.

Alas, there’s here a song, saying something of “Cossack Kin,”

As though the sale of dignity were a worse than mortal sin.

Yet, with will, one might forget one’s roots

And can come to love the taste of foreign boots.