The woodpecker chips at the bark – easy route to the worm?
I take my time waking you, though I rose at dawn.
Your war is over – to each his own frost.
You skated on the Volga, iced Ladoga kissed,
but my frost was the morgue: from orphan to orderly,
so as not to starve, I pulled funeral trolleys.
There’s a sacred meaning in this meeting of fate and fate –
it was to unfreeze life that you and I met.
by Инна Львовна Лиснянская (Inna Lvovna Lisnyanskaya)
(2001)
translated by Daniel Weissbort
She was the wife of Semyon Lipkin. The above poem was written shortly before his death.
There isn’t much about her in English so if you want to know more you may have to research her husband intially and work from there for biographical details. However one collection of her poetic works titled ‘Far from Sodom‘ is available in English should you wish to read more of her writing.
She was born in Baku and published her first collection in 1957 then moved to Moscow three years later. In 1979 she and her husband resigned from the Union of Soviet Writers in protest to the expulsion of Viktor Yerofeyev and Yevgeny Popov from it. The following seven years her works were only published abroad though from 1986 she was able to publish regularly and was awarded several important prizes.
Rambling At The Bridge Head 