REGINA DERIEVA
Quid pro quo
If one doesn’t know the perspective, the hills
cover the distance, but one can climb
Eleon and tear from the beggar’s
pouch an even strip of the road’s line
Dirt or snow, it’s all the same.
Ecclesiastes had scattered the times
along with stones and previous testament
had not realized what guilt is.
Sea of hills, sea of blood and sea
of the crooked roads, oceans of stones.
If one escapes both live and dead
one has to live without all roots.
You have to end with the promise of life’s
gauge and straighten the tongue,
to end with the fierce and endless fights
and to thrive to the heights where God reigns.
Russian Album
The palace on the square – Palazzo
(which is the same), thick
cabbage-soup of bushes, clown’s laugh
and tears of Russia, motherland.
And common man of the suburbs,
man who is poor and humble.
And life from one news to another
and the battle at unknown Kalka
A short period, infrequent sigh,
fierce vengeful cold, summer quickly passing.
And the shepherd is kind and yet unhappy
and the skeleton’s persuasiveness
in an empty closet. Vista’s influence
on a gesture and walk, on sight and speech.
And cry about the unexpected ones
and to the heaven free approach.
Fire in Moscow, war and again
war. Prayers and banners.
a wild mixture of the public and
the Ivanov-Petrov alliance,
Mix of the Republics. Dostoevsky.
An axe with the animal on the orbit.
And to the cemetery leads Nevsky
Prospect, and there are wasps instead of warrants.
And net from the childhood
with a gory dead body, and worms in apples,
in plums. An angel by every booth
and by every ravine there is a devil.
And the power is not of the Reds or Gray ones,
and space for the wretched, which is crowded.
And the Sky that is merciless and boundless,
and the cross that is found on the road.
June 17, 1995
Eleon
The venous snow, swollen snowdrifts.
Intolerable dark and slush.
You have to close the boundaries of the heart
to have your freedom be bemoaned by speech.
I could have said about sovereignty
to the Trojan horse, to the metal or
to the war, that captured and reigns
the world and there is nothing more.
There is no one any more who wouldn’t invade
who wouldn’t seize, trample down, cause
pain so hard, that you try to live so badly
you send to fight your language for the cause.
The Webster, Werther, wind were written already.
Already Moscow was burned and Troy fell.
To meet the Word the world is worn out already
to open the borders and begin this all.
Autumn Tirade
I haven’t been anywhere, besides somewhere,
somehow, don’t remember, don’t know, whenever.
My memory is bad, since it was harmed
by a wild invasion, by insolent seizure.
My fellow tribesmen became the enemies
and contemporaries too. What can you do
to make me forget the real name?
The tree with its branch was knocking on the window.
Thus I came over for the time extended,
this is a dark place, remote space,
to hold all of this against myself
and to give up my role of the outcast.
I am guilty for those and for this:
the degree of my guilt is really greater
than that of the Doctor of Oxford, it will go unnoticed
somewhere, somehow that unconscious babble.
I am not entitled to more than God
has given me, because somewhere, somehow
the soul will stand once at the door
step looking at the body of a dead poet.
I am staying. I will not be on the make:
not to grab, take over, not to break
the soul’s right to the heavenly name,
the beggar’s right to the shepherd’s crook.
Dedicated to I. Yefimov
The Flying Dutchman is no longer a flying one, -
It’s now laid up. You threw away the eternity key again
into the refuge of salt.
Let the sea cry with you all along,
the soul’s page washed out and
didn’t flow into the window
like a winter bird.
What snow writes to her are her thoughts,
what blizzard to her whispers.
And she whispers and writes: I am alone, you are alone,
we’re alone in the darkness.
I would like to get frozen, to thaw, to disappear,
before the beginning
of feverish power, metal and fire
and military green.
December 10, 2001
Monuments are Lies
Monuments are lies
embodied in stone.
And a man – is a lie,
embodied in a body.
When people turn into statues,
they disappear out of sight from other people.
The human counts on love,
but others treat him as a statue -
they simply don’t notice.
1994
Translated by Andrey Gritsman
Regina Derieva has published twenty books of poetry, essays,
prose and translations. Her works were translated into many
languages. Her work has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation,
Poetry East, Ars-Interpres and many others. Regina currently lives
in Sweden.
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