Inna Lisnianskaya
You see, I am caught in the trap of myself
I am caught in the trap of myself –
At the height of day, I cry: I am here!
Humiliate me, people!
Crucify me!
My dark outcry lasts for three dawns,
Not a rooster’s cry, but a raven’s call.
The bell-ringers will toll
Not lighted lamps, but bells.
Branded by a searing guilt,
Retribution I await.
Under the brick wall I shall crush
The lamps’ glass under my bare foot.
Lord, what am I saying to You?
Three nights, in a fever, I burn.
The bells have shaken loose the dawn …
Lord, what am I saying to you?
[1983]
To Maria Petrovykh*
Here lies your book, in front of me –
And I see your face.
Here is your time, always in a hurry,
Curling into a ring
By the birches, under which you sleep without pills,
a ring of tobacco smoke hovers.
You are awake and are now smoking,
After a cup of tea, of course.
I rang the bell long ago,
Now, I’ll rap on the tree-trunk:
Let me in, dear, Just for a minute or two,
I’ve brought your book!
An eye lights up in the birch,
And I hear the bark creak –
I must revise a few lines,
But there’s no pen handy.
“So, let me in! I’ve brought a pen.”
“Someone else’s? What’s the use!”
The birch tree, silvery, has closed its eyes
And has become like you.
[1983]
*Poet and translator, friend of Anna Akhmatova and Lisnianskaya. Very little of her poetry, written mostly in the 1930s is in print at this time.
The day flares over the thinning grove,
Tilting all live thing towards the stream;
In my breast a coal grows cold,
Scalding only me.
Should I contradict the vast expanse,
Which does not know its own spirit?
Distance myself from the beast of burden
Though I too am one of that herd?
How much do I need? A little bread,
Some water, and to forget water
Which, for some reason, always seemed
Left over from the Flood.
How much do I need? I know in advance
I shall take myself to the place of slaughter,
Take myself there to be sacrificed,
On the path leading into the gully.
[1983]
The Rain in January
What’s the matter, sad one, rain?
Your time has come. And so?
I’m smoking, smoking again, again
Absent-mindedly, burning a hole in the cover.
Do you weep because you want
To return to the darkness of those days,
In which I struck a prophetic note
On your little violin,
Going on about how you were raised
To keep alive hill and dale,
And are now saturated
With the poisons we distil?
What’s the matter, weeper, why sob?
Did you miss our world,
standing like a dressing-table,
Less its three enchanted mirrors.
(1989)
I studied all this as in school
In unsure sleep, not disposed to dream,
And old age resembled childhood,
As does late autumn early spring.
Either a coffin or a cradle
dark as night or bright as day.
Either a devil’s smile or an angel’s
Wrinkling the mirror of the lake.
But where are you in present time,
The bread of life, life’s course-books?
For long have I lived in the future,
Like a forgotten article in a Roman codex.
[1991]
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