POEMS

By Daria Lis
Translation: Hanna Komar, John Farndon

***
There are few of ours on the streets –
Most are at home and are offline.
Flashbacks from the past
Are useless things.
There is plague in the city.

Winter 2020

***
You crawl
From boredom to despair.
Wasting days,
You don’t sleep at night.
No books,
No roads –
Silence.

Winter 2020

***
Someone flies off the bridge.
Someone goes to war.
And somewhere there is a hospital,
Oxygen and you.

07.01.2022

***
You can’t talk about your problems…
Who to? To those already in prison
Sleeping on bare planks…
Going nuts without friends and books.
Letters never arrive.
And it’s not torture, not yet…
Just a painfully familiar fear.

You can’t tell them
There is neither snow nor rain
In the sky. Who lives in the dump basement
and who used to live on the 10th.
You are afraid of heights,
Of airplanes and elevators.

You can’t tell anyone
About your horror, the pressure,
Depressed artists
And low haemoglobin.
You can’t tell them.
Even dreams are shot there.

September 2022