Dmitry Blizniuk: Three poems

Translated by Sergey Gerasimov

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The World at Night

at night, the world

takes a break from people;

it rests like animals

in the cages of the Colosseum,

and the sand above recalls the sea,

and something personal it can still remember,

something romantic,

some innermost things,

but not the taste of urine, feces, blood, or sweat;

the night is the clear conscience of the beast.

the transient mutual understanding

of the two feuding worlds –

Siamese warriors are sleeping,

embracing the enemy like lovers…

on a moonlit night,

a starry unicorn

comes into our garden

to regale itself on windfall apples,

and I watch, enchanted,

as it picks up carefully a crushed fruit,

trying not to gouge the wet ground with its horn,

which glitters like broken glass and salt.

and drying leaves

under its hoofs hiss

like dispersible aspirin.

.

A Shard of Stone in Chicken Soup

a sharp light is filtering through the curtains –

the musketeers of dust are fencing lazily

with the rapiers of sunrays.

and you are just a drop

held together by surface tension,

by the tension of mediocrity.

like a shard of flint stone in chicken soup – you are always a foreign body

even if you blend in so easily.

these are the dark winding stairs of personality,

where all the electric lights are off,

and your inner tungsten filament

flickers like a snake.

go on your way, passerby.

.

A Greek Church 

a Greek church. the Jesus in the frescoes

holds a primer, its pages turned to you.

the letters are big, like on an optometrist’s eye chart:

read aloud what you see.

he has a beautifully pedicured foot,

and the wounds on his legs are vertical

and red like gills.

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Translation copyright 2022 Sergey Gerasimov.

Poems copyright 2022 Dmitry Blizniuk.

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet who lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Recent poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Eurolitkrant, Poet Lore, EastWest Literary Forum, The London Magazine and Pleiades. His poems have been awarded the RHINO 2022 Translation Prize.