And late one evening we came to the city’s great gate.
Guards shined the bloody flames of lanterns in our faces.
We listened quietly, with pounding hearts, to the painful
Curses; tattered, soaked with the autumn rains…
Into the city of our birth, carried through the years in our hearts.
Prostrate, we caressed the cobbled streets, kissed each stone,
And swooned in the abundance of the lullaby’s ringing words:
We greedily drank them from the lips of passers-by…
With large, amazement-filled eyes, children stood in the street…
Until midnight… Oh, those night rains and the ringing
Of the tower’s copper clocks drip into the heart –
My homeland’s yellow honey! It flows through the lips,
Through the thirsty eyes… Lord, how good it is to weep the tears
of the birth-clouds!
How good to sleep on the floor of one’s birth!
Someone laughing loudly walks past us. Blows out the lights.
A pale streetwalker moans and collapses beside us.
We get up. We walk, quiet and mute. Our wooden shoes
Echo like a dry cough down the dark crossroads.
The wind sways our empty rain-soaked hands.
In the distance beat the foaming ocean’s muffled drums…
Later we ladled the salty water in our sweaty helmets.
And in the ocean sands – as if in graves – we slept beneath
the lidded boats:
With vagrant dogs and crumbled yellow amber stars.
And we clasped them with petrifying palms
To breasts tattooed with pierced hearts and sailboats…
And we did not wake in the morning, and never wakened in the
shifting sands of the seatowns of our birth.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
(Henrikas Nagys)
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Based on Topics: Night Poems, Light Poems, Faces Poems, Morning Poems, Children Poems, Cities Poems, Birth Poems, Autumn PoemsBased on Keywords: tattooed, jonas, lidded, petrifying, rain-soaked, ladled, sailboats, zdanys