Graveyards of cars
 |
| Piskorsky, Forêt, 1918 |
In a graveyard
of machines, dead cars sleep like hunks of fractured stars,
red flowers of
mold mark time rusted into metal,
only the sun’s
unknown nucleus still rocks like an eternal truth
we can’t
grasp, like the blue essence of benzene.
Like jackals,
human scavengers rend the metal corpses,
merchandising
their poverty and greed in the marketplace,
and in
gas-colored nights the metal corpses are beds of love
for cripples
and whores, funnels for the fumes of the spiked stars.
As we dig the
bones of pangolins out from beneath the scored rock,
so men will
unearth the metal bones of our cities.
Girls wearing
nameless flowers, palmtrees growing bread, green rue,
rising cities
with sky-blue squares where fire-lions cavort,
and the edgy
shadows, shaky phantoms,
get up from
under the earth, squares, grass.
Metropolis,
drop the palms
of your brick walls over the eyes of these cars forever.
 |
| Bohdan-Ihr Antonytch par Youry Kokh, 2006 |
Translated by Mark Rudman (with the collaboration of Bohdan Boychuk)
Bohdan [-Ihor]
Antonych, Selected Poetry, Ardis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, 1977
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