A Fable by Daniil Kharms

One short man said: “I would give anything if only I were even a tiny bit taller.”

He barely said it when he saw a lady medegician standing in front of him.

“What do you want?” says the medegician.

But the short man just stands there so frightened he can’t even speak.

“Well?” says the medegician.

The short man just stands there and says nothing. The medegician vanishes.

And the shortman started crying and biting his nails. First he chewed off all the nails on his fingers, and then on his toes.

—–

Reader! Think this fable over and it will make you somewhat uncomfortable.

 

by Даниил Иванович Хармс (Daniil Ivanovich Kharms)

a.k.a. Даниил Иванович Ювачёв (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov)

(1935)

translated by Matvei Yankelevich and Eugene Ostashevsky

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Cardiff Elms by Gillian Clarke

Until this summer

throught the open roof of the car

their lace was as light as rain

against the burning sun.

On a rose-coloured road

they laid their inks,

knew exactly, in the seed,

where in the sky they would reach

percise parameters.

 

Traffic-jammed under a square

of perfect blue I thirst

for their lake’s fingering

shadow, trunk by trunk arching

a cloister between the parks

and pillars of a civic architecture,

older and taller than all of it.

 

Heat is a salt encrustation.

Walls square up to the sky

without the company of leaves

or the town life of birds.

At the roadside this enormous

firewood, elmwood, the start

of some terrible undoing.

 

by Gillian Clarke

from Letters from a Far Country (1982)