It’s getting dark, slantwise, just a notch from eternity.
The ballerina of reverie
takes slowly off
her pointes of silence.
Left … now the right one … A long sigh …
A fence; birds made of twisted iron
hungrily peck the rust.
A black cat glides along the façade.
The radiant rapiers of electric light are trembling;
the streetlights in fencer’s masks
(the left hand is held behind the back)
wait for the dawn, even though the night has just started.
The day is dying—long live the day …
The Lord has left the door half open,
the door to another world,
and slipped away through the sunset.
But the brick-red light flows from under the door,
and shadows move—someone walks above the clouds
on the carpet of the fir tops.
At night, I turn a table lamp on.
It looks like an ostrich,
and the long sharp wedge of light
knifes the linoleum.
The second hand
methodically pushes the beads of time,
hardworking dung beetles.
The soul is rounded up by ideas,
like a diving boy by a shoal of friendly dolphins.
So what? I’ve never been on this planet before.
And on this beach of time either.
I like it here.
I wouldn’t exchange my life with the clearheaded Caesar,
or belligerent Alexander the Great,
or King Solomon.
And neither would they.
You can’t jump higher than your karma lets you,
Higher than a rainbow,
or electric wires in the sky …
But my poems are floating there now …
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, and many others. His poems have been awarded RHINO‘s 2022 Translation Prize and his folio had been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist. Directory: http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk.
Sergey Gerasimov is a writer, poet, and translator who lives in Ukraine. His writing has been published in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, POETRY, The Threepenny Review, and dozens of other places. Since day one of the Russian attack on Ukraine, he has lived in Kharkiv, written about six hundred anti-war articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in Switzerland, and DTV, one of the biggest publishers in the German language, published his book, Feuerpanorama.
Image: KarlGaff, commons.wikimedia.org
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