Once it was the Colour of Saying by Dylan Thomas

Once it was the colour of saying

Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill

With a capsized field where a school sat still

And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;

The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo

That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.

When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park

Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo

Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,

The shade of their trees was a word of many shades

And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;

Now my saying shall be my undoing,

And every stone I wind off like a reel.

 

by Dylan Thomas

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Fun Facts: ‘Mitching’ is Skivving, bunking, skipping school.

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Naked Thoughts Live Unembellished by Inna Lisnianskaya

Naked thoughts live unembellished.

That saying’s a lie, you can’t

twice and so forth, whatever it is.

A thousandth time I enter the same river.

 

And I see the same grey stones on the bottom,

the same carp with its gristly fins,

the same sun in the blue patch of sky

washes the yellow spot for ages.

 

In the same river the willow weeps,

the same waters ripple tunefully,

no day passes but into the same river

I enter, the very same life.

 

by Инна Львовна Лиснянская (Inna Lvovna Lisnyanskaya)

(2003)

translated by Daniel Weissbort

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She was the wife of Semyon Lipkin. The above poem was written shortly after 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.