Answer me!
What’s the matter? Here, whisper it in my ear.
Atavism?..
Or perhaps – soul cancer.
To the world’s best woman,
to its most full of youth
ill-fortune came.
And she was gentle,
Her eyes held a Fayum sparkle.
She rode motorbikes,
crouched over them, plunged in them
Like a barb
Stuck in a raging, bellowing boar!
She starts from the dacha,
with its big cars and roughshaven men.
There comes the surrender
Of her most pure frontiers.
And then a crash,
eyes weighed under, puffy as a nimbus.
And someone’s frail, mouse-like paws
Sticking like oil-cloth.
Autumn flakes brick
over the garden.
A man falls asleep, cries out in the night!
Something is crushing her slender shoulders –
the night does not assuage!
The dacha
pounds
the prisoner
like a tartar stage.
Notes on this poem
© Zoya Boguslavskaya.