LOVE

Don't step so cerefully, please.
I'm not as fragile as glass.
What I need is a fresh March breeze –
And I'll sprout like a blade of grass.

Shoes trample the frozen earth;
No stone in a field am I
But a rye-stalk trapped in ice
While pecking through to the sky.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg



FURROW AFTER FURROW

Let's spread sacks on the clods and lie down.
Gnats! I'll smoke, and they'll fly off, for sure.
How the sacks and the field-fringes smell
Of fresh-cut potatoes and drying manure!

Look – those sunbeams on root-woven turf
Crimson-hued, like earthworms they crawl.
Red, too, blackbirds through furrows walk,
Furrows stretching towards the sun's ball.

Blackbirds waddling after the sun
Search for something, their beaks bending down;
Maybe, for a forgotten world
Where the turf was ripped up by a wooden plough?

Bleached fog spreads through the countryside.
Clouds arise like pink pillows on high.
Having marvelled all day at machines,
Why do blackbirds each night homeward fly?

One by one, over furrows they pass...
Who, who was it that drew the first one?
Not to rockets – to ploughshares glory let's sing
Which went farthest of all and first reached the sun!

Let's spread sacks on the clods and lie down.
And watch blackbirds seek the first furrow.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg



I WILL WAIT

We're watering cows. The chain hits the weeds
Like a pike. On the pond water wrinkles crawl.
Wrinkles... Can wrinkles be felt indeed
On one's face, like on water? It isn't yet Fall,

It's Summer. Waiting for grain and fruit.
Not today will nests show, but when last leaves fall.
Summer. It draws towards September's feast.
I'm waiting for apples. But who waits for Fall?

Still, still I wait for the first trip to school,
For the years to pass, for my beard to show,
For the cows to drink, for my first grey hair.
Waiting's the essence of life, I know.

Like a pikefish, the chain drops into the weeds.
Soon no wrinkles again is the water wearing.
Can you feel the wrinkles vanishing too
From your face? Is Fall really so wary?

Run the tips of your fingers over your face.
The gossamer clings to your hands. Sticky stuff!
Again? Oh well, we'll water our cows
And wait all our life till they drink enough.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg



SCYTHIANS

Despite all wars and ruin never changing,
Coloured like ancient bronze turned green in graves,
The rye keeps galloping like Scythians of past ages;
The ears like spears above the dense horde wave.

Where can their horses drink? Rivers are straightened;
Their swords are under glass – how can they fight?
On pictures, only, Scythians tether horses...
As if it's cast in bronze, the rye stands quiet.

Eternal rye! Lo – burial mounds stir, ghostly,
And rivers wind again. Again thatched roofs.
And lo – again the earth's back shines, bronze-coloured,
Stripped of Time's garments, naked as the truth.

Over the straightened river, as of old,
The moon bends like a Scythian drinking.
With stirrups half-moon-shaped, a warrior skims
To the other bank, among the waves half-sinking.

Ride, Scythians! Like time on ancient bronze,
The wind leaves ageless imprints on the rye.
The rye rides on, although it seems to stand,
Etched on our instants, as away they fly.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg



THE BREAD-CRUMB

Planets are tamed. Flame-crowned by spaceships, Earth
Skims on with me, its passenger, on board.
I boarded it initially at birth
And with my cradle since through space have soared.

Maybe I am too earthbound – maybe!
But from my boyhood I have known one law:
Bend down and pick up from the ground each bread-crumb
You noticed to have fallen on the floor.

And to this day with my maturing hand
Lifting that bread-crumb, I've held it above –
That bread-crumb – sometimes turning into flesh
And sometimes blood, the vehicle of love.

Graves, and the fight for bread live in my heart.
O peaceful tiller, what can give you wings?
You and your earth – both owe to bread
To rise above the range of earthly things.

Stars circle on their orbits overhead.
I hold a tiny bread-crumb in my hand
For you, long-tamed, no more a mistery –
Dove-coloured heavens of my fatherland.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg



HAYMAKING

In the night the stars fall gooseberry-like, prickly.
In the night the stars fall earthward, blindly, fatally.
Welcome, haymaking! Behind your shoulders, fluttering,
Scythes like angel-wings shine black and metally.

Mighty mowers! Wield your scythe-blades warily,
Then upon the fading grassblades dropping,
Listen to your heart, how it leaps merrily
Like a frog over a scythe-blade hopping.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg



AT DAWN

Only nightingales should ever
touch such porcelain frail silence.
I'm afraid I'd cry out, as if dreaming
my feet were being shod.

Flooded, the springs all stay quiet.
The bees' summer, in wax.
To me you are that startling: a sob
or laugh, at dawn, from the woods.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



AT NOON

There was a house on fire.
They'd taken everything out in time,
Everything they wanted saved.
It was high noon.
A clock abandoned
In a side room
Struck twelve
Against the flaming wall.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



TRIP TO THE MOON

That's no moon at all:
my neighbor's yard, snowed in,
where a dog keeps watch
prone, his eyes drawn out like candle flames.

One move from me, he's up barking,
running every which way, sniffing the snow:
and leaves the chain broken
to make a full circle around the moon.

Meanwhile, on earth: no sounds, or voices.
And the drifts flicker, down here as well.
I'll go knock on the door
at the moon's old homestead.

With the stars snowed in like grass stems
by the white cloud caps,
what say, we go over? Get your coat on,
there are dogs in the moon, barking.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



THE CRUCIFIXION OF JUDAS

Bystander, passerby, guest:
Here just to visit, not to take part.
You know what non-being is:
You learned that while you lived.

Yet it was life you kissed!
And it did pay off, you Judas!
Like your haul in silver,
One grain from thirty cast. 

Rye is sharp as a nail.
Drag your own cross uphill,
Wretch, and the ryegrain will
Take root in your palm.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



LET ME LOOK

We claim the right to feed our craving for travel,
express trains thunder across the earth.
The people, skies, and earth itself, even the
Mona Lisa at the Louvre,
each in a hundred pair of eyes sees otherwise.

Allow me to gaze through eyes we all have,
over again, one second at a time,
not on billboards of world capitals,
or sculptures of unsurpassed genius,
but at least on the smallest
bird track in the snow there is.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



PRESIDENTIAL CAKE

Precisely at twelve one night
I dreamt I was president already,
The ballot-boxes torn open,
The votes all shaken loose
And stuffed
Into a soft downy pillow for me.

Irritated, exhausted,
But having gathered the most votes,
The president went off to rest.
Already he was eating
Presidential cake in his dream.
Sleep was sweet.
Drool slid down his chin.

There was nothing inside my mouth,
That's why I dreamed
That the ballot-box was
Full of the ashes
Baked into
A presidential cake especially for me,
Precisely at twelve that night.

Clenching my teeth, I was determined
To go on dreaming I was president
By virtue of the most votes received.
Precisely at twelve that night,
A general search for metals having color
Through all the cemetery vaults
Caused ballot-boxes to be ripped open,
1 graves to be counted:
e dead outnumbered the living,
he living outnumbered those yet to be born
But the dead-count outnumbered the rest.

Like being at a wake,
Having to share one long bench with my numerous nation,
Picking at the presidential cake –
It was layered, with fishbone mixed in,
To get them hooked on it!
Who's hooked? All up and jumped
Off that long bench, all my numerous nation,
In such large numbers
That even I jumped up,
A president of dreams.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Born into a family of peasants in the village of Urviniai, in 1958 Albinas Bernotas graduated from the department of Lithuanian language and literature at the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. Having studied to become a teacher, specializing in literature, he taught for a while, then proceeded to work as an editor on various journals. His verse was first published in 1954. Bernotas has published eight collections of poetry, one collection of essays and has translated Russian and Polish poetry and prose into Lithuanian. His best work is on conventional themes, keeping a close focus on ordinary experience and proceeding by associative logic in delightfully measured leaps. His poems are marked by a restrained lyrical tone based on the realities of everyday life in the country and on thoughts about the history of the Lithuanian countryside.