For Violeta
There's nothing more, only a nightingale in frost
sobbing for resurrection, only the wild
pansy waiting around for dawn. Nothing
other than the light studying a face
through dawn-struck drawn curtains.
There's nothing, other than footprints in a map
of dunes, a railway network to the east.
Nothing more. And it's not worth seeing past
the limits of poverty: a faded summer survives
to endure winter in highway billboard shields.
Nothing else. But is it worth hoping?
Processions of despair climb the stairs
of early dawn, coming closer. There's nothing else.
For sure? A sand-castle on the beach
quivers with the newborn, as yet unwashed morning.
Nothing more. Rowboats with lowered hands
and bees in frost-embedded hives breaking
into tears. Nothing but this. Just a subdued
Miles Davis allowing a slight breather
to turn the freezing page over.
"for this generation, so split up, vulgarized, clipped, made
dizzy with all the grime clouding body and soul, the task of
poetry is to revive and raise the individual and draw him or her,
as far as possible, into the amazing, many-faceted and
all-but-incredible world of language"
Julius Keleras
(transl. Vyt Bakaitis)
New York, NY, USA / Vilnius, Lithuania
