‘What did they do’ by Boris Slutsky

What did they do

with the relatives of Christ?

What did they do with them?

No written source

will tell you a damned thing –

nothing but crossings out, emptiness.

What the hell did they do with them?

 

What did they do

with those simple people,

simple craftsmen, men who worked on the land?

Were all marched off to some nearby wilderness,

lined up and machine-gunned?

 

Whatever happened then, two centuries later

there were no demands for compensation or calls for revenge?

Total posthumous rehabilitation of Jesus

led to no rehabilitation of kin.

 

And now flowers are growing from the relatives of Christ.

Below them lie depths, above them rise heights,

yet world history had found no place

for those relatives of Christ.

 

by Борис Абрамович Слуцкий (Boris Abramovich Slutsky)

(1977)

translated by Robert Chandler

 

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Pinnacles Exposed by Ludwig Derangadage Scotty

Scorched, by searing rays of sun, bleached white;

Exposed, to elements of wind and rain, stood firm;

Forgotten, by generations of man and beast, eerily lonely;

Await, fateful destiny for restoration and use, obediently silent;

Forever beckoning to the heaven’s universe,

through merciful abeyance;

Disturbed, spirits of ancestors long gone, wailing on the breeze;

Groaning, amongst debris of machinery derelict, voices unclear;

Mesmerized, by haunting moonlit shaded, in peaceful bliss;

Carefree, days bygone on forefathers’ land, in reminiscence;

Witness, the ultimate destruction of Naoero land, for gains;

Leaving only birds afraid, hunted by man with aid;

To forever linger, undisturbed, until rehabilitation proper.

 

by His Excellency Ludwig Derangadage Scotty, former president of Nauru

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In a book titled ‘World Leaders’ Favourite Poems’ he chose one he wrote himself…