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"God Exists"
Leaky windows –
Like leaky lungs: pores clean through
Forever
It is forever cold, even in summer
Forever poverty and fear,
That should the drunken commander return
To claim the debt
That should the money, noodles and potatoes be completely finished
That should everything be over
When is everything over?
I am afraid, I will not win through,
I am afraid together with that Orthodox monk
Who waits in the freezing river
For the wolves besieging him to run away
Or for dawn to come
But here it dawns so heavily so eerily
Here is the land of the moon not the sun
I feel it, mostly under the full moon,
Which stabs clean through the frozen window,
Waking me up piercing my eyes
Side by side with the Wermacht soldier wakened by the searchlight
Nearsighted, with broken glasses, freezing,
His harmonica lost,
Wrapping his bare feet in the putrid remains of promises
Picked from the ruins,
Chattering with rotten teeth,
But yielding up with relief
It’s over
Nothing is over
I fall asleep and wake up in the same cold ruins
The piercing full moon glares –
I feel sick
Chiefly because it screams from the wall in black letters –
Why this fashion to write on walls
With stanzas of poems, with maxims, with bookish wisdom –
So when all this cold refuses to clear but, it seems,
Seeps deeper and deeper, already into the bones,
In the cold house with a wailing stick in the gray lair
Somebody is knocking at the door
Hey, anybody here?
There’s
Only a note on the wall
“God is”
Nothing – else
Arnas Ališauskas
Translated from Lithuanian by Eugenijus Ališanka and Kerry Shawn Keys
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