Thursday, September 18, 2025

If You Go to America and Look Around, You Should Wonder Why They Tried To Destroy the Greatest Trees First

 

“Here where the thorns grow,
spreading over mounds of dust and ruins.
These eyes of mine once saw
the gardens blooming in the spring.”

—Mir, trans. Ralph Russell

Where people cut trees
and raze memory, ages,
to barren drought and dust,
former meadows harden
under a scorching shine,

and thorns begin to rise
as if earth itself were turned
to bear blood-drawing horns.
And the point?—To teach
the stubborn the taste of bitter

remedy called humbleness,
and the humble, in turn,
how to breed stubbornness.
In a word: where souls and life
are cut short, the land itself

starts laying a feast
for greatly wanted asses—
to match the stubborn
bareness of hearts and souls,
whether adrift or wedged fast

between reefs and shoals,
passing to each other
the tokens of Judas—
kind kisses of chilling betrayal—
while stalked by arid shades.

Monday, September 15, 2025

Encounter of Encounters (Epigram)

 

A gesture unfurls—

love’s script as silk

that lips withheld

like a shade at noon,

running on that face

an evanescent arabesque.

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Does Time Exist Past the Image?

 

“How much of me lies beyond
the image the mirror grants?”
she confessed she often wondered—

“How high, how brief,
the span my life can reach?
For the glazing chill of glass

shows a portion, yet withholds—
the rest, asleep, concealed,
uncertain, poised between

what can seize time’s fleeting breath,
as in the mirror’s sudden frieze,
and what path lies polished for the eye.”

Sunday, September 7, 2025

The Old Austro-Hungarian Recipe of How to Turn Humans into Ghosts

 

The so-called “fast train” from Prague
lurched into Ostrov near midnight,
its human freight distilled to a pack
of bloodless, pallid ghosts—

six long hours drained from the capital,
diverted through North Bohemia,
skirting the Doupovské hory,
that obsolete military zone

severing the West from its heart—
though the straight road from Prague
was scarcely sixty miles.

Perhaps that is why no one ever danced,
stepping off that train
and into town.