Translated by Max Nemtsov

**THE PAST LIFE

REINCARNATION**

They’ve knocked from below the deck Before, they’d had it in check So it goes

In my past life

Now I can call My life before the war

My past life

Everything was different Everything has become past

To the judgement Deck To the judgement Day

I was born in kharkiv It didn’t sound terrible then Nor tragic Nor irrevocable

My granny’s khrushchevka apartment Was located in byron street It was a sign No one could get

The street was renamed later When they remembered That byron never visited Kharkiv

It was now named Stalingrad heroes avenue And the new name sounded Menacing to me It was a sign No one could get I cried then For those other sounds made The space Foreign

Later I moved to germany To katzenbergstraße No cats walk it And the mountains are far away

My friends tell me That soon the street Of my childhood Will again become Byron street

Byron seemed To have visited it After all

This Street It’s a sign Now I get it

Here’s the place The house was here And here there was a garden

What is now What is now Here

The world abhors The vacuum

But now There is The ringing Emptiness

It resides Patiently In you And in me

THE MURMURATION

The murmuration is the most interesting Thing I saw in rome

I had dreams Of the eternal city

I knew its palaces Fountains And parks

All its roads In the books . . .

Mine led to rome, too

I stumbled On the first Stone Of the appian way

In the huge Merciless Empire

And only the murmuration Overhead

Starlings Took wing

Those ideal formations Of the celestial host

An impression Formed

It pressed On the memory

Of my rome Of my orb

You can’t step twice Into the same buckwheat

The abyss opened Filled with

A plate Of horror Of a child’s supper

Endless

Dark Winter Evening

In the hat Of a shell-shocked one

I put my mittens on

I’m alone

TSUNAMI

The safe time Will never come

To build a house on a beach In the era of tsunamis

To plant a cherry tree In the era of forest fires

To give birth to a child Is always hard

In the era of fires The era of tsunamis The era That we are becoming

The safe time Will never come

I look at the sea Holding my son by his hand

I’ve built a house

I see A tsunami