WOMEN WAITING FOR SHIPS
The small white towers
perched on the roofs were made once
to wait for old time boats.
They look like street lamps.
Broken cages,
abandoned by the light.
Heavenly phials for tears….
But I can feel that even those figures are empty,
because we haven’t stopped
noticing
the small white towers
meant for solitary,
ever waiting,
captain’s wives.
We are seized by other oceans.
The atomic submarines lie across
at Groton’s bottom.
But probably they too have already become
useless figures of an exhausted age…
Yet, what has survived
that fills us,
and glows inside us,
while we cleave the rollers
and after that?
Only you have survived,
silent women, sad and gorgeous–
women
waiting for whaling ships…
Specters of the old port.
We will sink.
You won’t believe it.
O darling,
open the door of dream –
I am on my way.
I am returning voluntarily
to the cage for fire.
And anew, a starry private cosmos rises.
My heart is sending off its sign to your heart
The beacon keeps beating in dactylic strikes:
two short lights and lengthy dark.
Translated into English by Valentin Krustev & Donna
Martell.
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