Maria Golosnaya, The Circle of Choices
The Tale of a Wrecked Boy
Mubarak Said
I was asked once to sketch
The portrait of ghosts and memories.
Now, I learn that any child without
The theory of pain in his veins is a corpse.
Perhaps, a fence has been erected on my eye,
The room is now a valley,
Where a woman’s eye is the source of a sea;
Where the flowers are the butterflies
To shield from rains and bullets.
Here, in fatherland, a mother’s breast is a venom
& to kill an ant is another way to survive.
In this little poem, a boy narrates
The tale of his hometown.
To love a man is to slaughter his daughter.
To move is to knock the door of death.
Today there’s no ink for our poetry,
& no names for metaphors and similes.
Here, mourning is a synonym to silence
& silence is a crime.
Mubarak Said
I was asked once to sketch
The portrait of ghosts and memories.
Now, I learn that any child without
The theory of pain in his veins is a corpse.
Perhaps, a fence has been erected on my eye,
The room is now a valley,
Where a woman’s eye is the source of a sea;
Where the flowers are the butterflies
To shield from rains and bullets.
Here, in fatherland, a mother’s breast is a venom
& to kill an ant is another way to survive.
In this little poem, a boy narrates
The tale of his hometown.
To love a man is to slaughter his daughter.
To move is to knock the door of death.
Today there’s no ink for our poetry,
& no names for metaphors and similes.
Here, mourning is a synonym to silence
& silence is a crime.