Let me tell you, it wasn’t Europe, I asked,
it was to St Peter’s in Rome that I pleaded for mercy…
when you have a complaint, you are constantly appealing,
sometimes to the European Parliament,
sometimes to the European Commission.
I want a sharp rhyme to strike you at the back of your head,
and tell you a contemporary rhyme:
a man with no biography cannot say
if a CV can stand in a biography’s stead.
You gather materials from dawn till dusk,
so that you don’t carry envy to your grave,
so that you can inform the liberal West of Kompromat
where even the mention of Christ needs a footnote.
When you rat on the accused to the judge,
the reward for slander is paid in silver.
Intrigue is no company at a feast
if neither Christ nor Judas Iscariot
should be present at the table.
To be trendy, to be in the mainstream,
men will sacrifice dignity for progress
Pilate’s ancestor,
the Athenian Meletus,
had the right to curse Socrates!
The Uffizi Gallery conserves a precious, bygone world,
one that glows with the glory of the past
and reminds me of a mummified pharaoh,
as I wrote to a Roman friend today.
I see and feel for the languages and dialects lost with globalisation,
having witnessed so much…
I see that, stretched across the northern plains,
Dzerzhinsky is introduced under Tolstoy’s name.
I sit at the bar and order a Jameson with ice
to feel I am a part of the world.
This doesn’t mean I’m better than you,
I just want to shorten the distance between me and the heavens.
USAID wants a prolonged cycle of protest –
someone is carried out with a torn meniscus,
and when the translator turned to English…
Dzerzhinsky turned out to be Brzezinski.
And you, you, friend, who measure
your neighbour’s grave with a new shovel,
who doesn’t stop whoring with slander
enriching the newsroom with ever fresh news.
— Here’s the traitor! — you scream, like in Munch’s painting.
You possess both the protocol
and the playbook,
and I think, you want the same in Brussels
that you diligently sought in Moscow.
And I wish the envious world of my country
might not be disturbed by my breath.
I wish old Europe would declare Christmas tomorrow,
I am sending yesterday’s Europe into tomorrow:
In Le Havre, dawn breaks, and Monet stands at his easel…
a gull’s cry trembles in the twilight
and the powerful harmony of Europe can be heard,
Athens – Rome – Jerusalem.
A fisherman defeated the Roman Empire
and Uriah’s flag is a cast-off garment hung from the rod…
I chalk on the local street walls:
Athens – Rome – Jerusalem,
these three cities are the whole of it.
Greetings to the aria of the Jewish captives!
With a new dactyl, I write to Aristotle:
Athens –
Rome –
Jerusalem.
As the scene at Golgotha plays on repeat,
and because I cannot trust the post,
I tie my poem to a pigeon’s leg.
I see the Spanish Jesus on my badge,
and, below it, the inscription,
Miguel de Cervantes.
The Knight of the Sad Countenance, who still roams today,
surrendered humbly to the author’s judgement
and died in bed as Quijano Alonso,
so bestowing immortality on La Mancha…
The wound opened by García Lorca
always leaves me shedding tears…
It is a Gypsy boy
and not Armstrong,
who first set foot on the moon.
Robert Bresson…
and the donkey’s falsetto…
show us the longing for the breeze of Golgotha,
but is interrupted in the middle by the donkey’s bray
in Franz Peter Schubert’s 20th sonata.
According to Bresson, the urn is full
of colourful pages from an exquisite menu.
Bread and water are the gourmet’s
main dish, the recipe never changes…
If you seek Europe, the debtor of credit,
dragged with a kick from the street to the vault,
you will find my poem too, should you look
in Tbilisi courtyards, right there on A4 sheets.
P.S.
And yet, a sliver of hope refuses to leave me
when I look at Las Meninas in the Prado,
or when a youth runs through the streets of Toledo,
the sun tied to his finger bowling along with him.
Endnotes
