Whoever is being executed – there’s raspberry compote
And the gigantic torso of the Georgian.
1. The body of King Arshak is unwashed, his beard runs wild.
2. His fingernails are broken, and wood-lice crawl across his face.
3. His ears, grown dull with silence, once listened to Greek music.
4. His tongue is scabbed from jailer’s food – which once pressed grapes against the palate and was adroit like the tip of a flautist’s tongue.
5. The seed of Arshak has withered in his scrotum and his voice is sparse as the bleating of a sheep.
6. King Shapukh, thinks Arshak, has got the better of me and, worse, has taken my air for himself!
7. The Assyrian holds my heart in his hand.
8. He commands my hair and fingernails. He grows my beard and swallows my spit, so used has he become to the thought that I am to be found here – in the fortress of Aniush.
9. The Kushan people rose up against Shapukh.
10. They snapped the frontier at an undefended place like a silken thread.
11. Like an eyelash in his eye, the attack pricked King Shapukh.
12. Both enemies screwed up their eyes, so as not to see each other.
13. Darmastat, the most gracious and best-educated of the eunuchs, encouraged the commander of the cavalry from the centre of Shapukh’s army. Darmastat wormed his way into favour, snatched his master, like a chess-piece, out of danger, remaining all the while in public view.
14. He had been governor of the province of Andekh in the days when Arshak’s velvet voice gave orders.
15. Yesterday Arshak was a king, but today is fallen into a crevice, huddles like a baby in the womb, and warms himself with lice, enjoying the itch.
16. When the time came for his reward, Darmastat’s request tickled the Assyrian’s keen ears like a feather:
17. Give me a pass to the fortress of Aniush. I should like Arshak to spend one more day, full of sounds, taste and smell, as it used to be when he entertained himself at the chase and saw to the planting of trees.
Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges,
Redden under scourges and to burn in frosts.
Your child-like arms are to lift heavy irons,
To lift heavy irons and to sew mail-bags.
Your tender soles are to walk barefoot on glass,
Barefoot on glass and blood-stained sand.
And I am here to burn for you like a black candle,
Burn like a black candle and not dare to pray.
Black earth
Over-esteemed, too-black, all in peak condition,
Everything groomed withers, everything aired;
Everything crumbling, coming together like a choir –
Wet clods of my ‘soil and freedom’!
In the days of early ploughing – black, almost blue.
And this is the foundation of unwarlike work –
A thousand mounds of furrowed language:
And something unbounded within these bounds!
And yet the earth is – a blunder, a blunt axe-head;
One cannot implore the earth, even if one falls at its feet:
Still it whets the hearing like a mildewed flute;
It ploughs the ear with a chilly, morning clarinet.
How pleasing fatty topsoil is to ploughshare,
How silent the steppe in its April upheaval!
Well, I wish you well, black earth: be firm, sharp-eyed…
A black-voiced silence is at work.
Yes, I’m lying in the earth, moving my lips,
But what I’m going to say every schoolboy shall know by heart:
The earth is at its roundest on Red Square
And its unchained curve is hard,
On Red Square the earth is at its roundest
And its curve, rolling all the way down to the rice fields,
Is unexpectedly expansive
While there are still any slaves on the earth.
You took away my seas and running jumps and sky
And propped my foot against the violent earth.
Where could this brilliant calculation get you?
You couldn’t take away my muttering lips.
My country conversed with me,
Spoiled me, scolded, didn’t listen.
She only noticed me when,
Grown-up, I became an eye-witness.
Then suddenly, like a lens, she set me on fire
With a beam from the Admiralty spire.
For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights,
Those breasts enticing the young Goethe,
Let me be answerable, but not lose all my rights.
There is a multifaceted life beyond the law.
A wave advances – one wave breaking another’s backbone,
Flinging itself at the moon in slavish yearning.
And a young janissary of a whirlpool –
In its untiring tidal metropolis –
Raves, slant-eyed, digging its ditch in the sand.
But through the flaky gloom
An unbuilt wall’s pale teeth rise up.
The soldiers of suspicious sultans
Fall from foaming stairs – dismembered, spattered.
Cold eunuchs bring the poison in.
I shall perform a smoky rite:
In this opal here, in my disgrace,
I see a seaside summer’s strawberries –
Cleft cornelians
And their brothers, agates like ants.
But a pebble from the sea’s depths,
A simple soldier,
Is more dear to me:
Grey, wild,
That no one wants.
I shall not return my borrowed dust
To the earth,
Like a white floury butterfly.
I will this thinking body –
This charred, bony flesh,
Alive to its own span –
To turn into a street, a country.
I can’t make sense of today –
A day somehow yellow-mouthed.
Dock gates stare at me
From anchors and mist.
Through faded water a convoy of battleships
Moves quietly, quietly,
And the narrow pencil-box canals
Look even blacker under ice.