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Serbo-Croatian
The Serbian girl crosses the street
avoiding the autumn bazaar and its hanging merchandise
she notices, that this fall there's plenty of gold in
the kerchiefs and vegetables -
the warm onion is so golden;
there's a lot of light in the restaurants
where portraits of Franz Joseph
hang on the walls.
The warmth of this autumn touches you too
and so does this young woman who searches for something
in her back pack,
pulling out her phone and pencils and placing them on
the table;
you'll have your winter yet
you'll have your dreams
but the sky grows heavier every autumn
and the devil
grabs sinners
like sugar plums
in brightly colored wrappers.
Bitter Slavic syntagmas;
she tells you she bought envelopes in the tobacco store,
and walked to the subway
and the doves, flew down and beat against her like rain;
because of her tale, no one notices the sun has set,
they only notice that her cheeks
have grown somewhat darker.
Try to explain to her,
that if you don't collect
the autumn clocks in time
they simply grow over-ripe and squirt
juice on your clothes and hands
which later attract bees
that pierce their stingers
straight into your heart.
Cleaning Ladies In The Corridors
The old cleaning ladies in the corridors
slowly scrape the floors, like ship decks;
do you hear, they're whispering about something in the
stairway,
fearfully hugging the walls,
using long hooks they fish out of the water
rats and bitter dreams.
The rooms all round are filled with shadows,
like battleships with coal;
the cleaning ladies in the corridors
scrape the scales with sharp knives,
shoving huge needles into the morning sun;
the end of autumn approaches
and the skies are so dark, as if someone's piled up
cut off chicken heads
and black roses.
When they wash off the blood
they gather at the train station, drink heated
wine
and talk about
how today fish lose their way in the Danube
and can't swim into the shallows
without the help of night lanterns
on ships,
without voices from the shore,
without openings and tunnels
in the damned ice.
Translated from the
Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps
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