Sooner or later, every post-war period
becomes a pre-war period.
The outcome of the Sixth World War
will depend on how we have treated
the prisoners-of-war from the Fifth.
by Борис Абрамович Слуцкий (Boris Abramovich Slutsky)
(early 1960s?)
translated by Robert Chandler
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
Lately I’ve been thinking about Efnisien.
The trouble-maker, the rash prince, the complicated man.
I see him in the north of Wales.
It’s the dead of night in the eleventh century,
everyone exhausted from feasting.
He slashes the lips, tails, and eyelids of horse
after horse until all the King of Ireland’s
steeds are maimed for his revenge.
In the dawn, he leans back to rest
against the toadflax growing in the castle walls.
I find myself heading toward that kind
of trouble. Wanting to disrupt the feast,
overturn the order, throw a child
into the fire to avenge some insult.
And later be perfectly willing to break
my heart for any neccesary reason.
by Margaret Lloyd
Rambling At The Bridge Head 