☀Today's Poem: "Prehistory" Tomas Venclova

I

To recognize the unwelcoming places where you grew
up in another land before the last century was through:
a fruitless stretch of dunes, willows, a warehouse wall
by the shore will hardly recall who lived here at all.
The lonely rushed through these streets with a taxi and three
carriages, while orangeade dripped on park paths. At three-thirty,
German girls gathered on the other side of the tracks,
saying Süsses Kind over the strollers along their path.
They yearned for the empire’s signs, walked the yellow
sand, and applauded the shadow on the balcony in the old
town, until their hairdos, hats, and rings were sunk
in bland waters by Marinescu in his victorious sub.

II

There is more to the landscape: importantly—the sky
and the piercing waves that gaze right into its eye,
smokestacks, stork-nest poles, willows sparsely
scattered along the lower banks of the canal,
the stink of flatfish, the wind rocking a shabby
yacht by the bridge. I see the teacher, holding his key,
returning from the Red Cross for a nap—
he gazes joylessly over his temporary flat:
laundry hung to dry in the garret, shutters knocking,
plaster peeling (onto the cradle?), bookshelves leaning
from Marxist tomes, and beyond the Danė river, he sees,
like a monotonous echo, timber frame homes recede.

III

The clatter of hooves—spoons and faience ring in answer.
The eye can spot a low Anglican church by the harbor.
Its roof is like the cover of an earthenware jar.
Nothing further. Europe’s threshold or boundary—
these flat shores, these swamps, fertilized equally
by the bones of Skalvians, Old Prussians, Vistula Veneti.
Catalogues of the past: nach Osten, Westen, one flees—
ships are sunk, the implacable weight of the sea
presses mustard gas drums. An irresistible current:
its echo bursts repeatedly on the desolate grassy fort.
And so the limpid reflection below a frozen skiff gleams
in morning cold, clearer than the skiff itself, it seems—

IV

so deep, like a voice hardly recognized in a dream
but which, in repeating a pointless sound, can mean
more than the people to whom one speaks. A nymph,
un-sleeping Echo, reigns over the world that is left.
Above the vanished city of my birth, from Bothnian
skerries to Skagerrak, from the fuming Eastern
Cape to Spit’s End, a clear rhythm, as from a trumpet,
sails out beyond us, announcing the Last Judgment:
it will wake us in the dark, lead us home from imprisonment,
so that we might be thankful for everything—even when
time erases all shape and gesture, like an experienced
censor, from the sheet of paper, the photo, and the text.