CHILDREN’S TRAIN

Get out of the rainy street into the auditorium,

in March when many of the city’s insane

warm themselves in libraries and free public toilets

turning their brown eyes to light like newts;

the generous hand of time dips into its watery reservoirs and pours into your palms

handfuls of mussels and snails,

comets and river rocks.

There was a time when all the trains stations in my city

stopped like alarm clocks

with a thousand broken springs;

hiding beneath the sky

in which two lights flew

like a person with two hearts,

red-haired girls who held dusk on the tip of their tongues,

sang a song of coal

full of old armor, clothes, and decaying tarantulas;

and on the hill where the city ended,

you could see the train

the workers took home.

In this mining village,

so much fire, tears, and coal

burned in the lungs, sails full of wind.

Why does the sky gather all the sweets,

goods and light

only to turn its back and disappear behind the hill?

We paid with our lives

for every invisible exhaled breath of each butterfly exhausted by the night,

for every orphan folding his sheets like a parachute in the morning,

for every clarinet stuck in your throat which won’t let you breathe,

transforming the voice into shadows and jazz into disease.

Hold me tighter. The experience

you gain is a scaffold

to support unsteady young lungs

with wire and chalk.

And the snow like old sheets

stuffed in the dresser drawers of heaven

won’t cover your grief. Look—

gusts dance from border to border

and train stations like unexploded bombs crouch in the dark,

and lonely night express trains like lake serpents

swim through the dark beating their tails

around your heart.

Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps