THE END OF A TREE

Firewood crackles in an earthen stove.
Ages gaze out of the evening gloom;
While we scoop out the white ashes, wait,
Patient, the dark corners of the room.

Where to pour them? With its crown once raised
Sky-high, shedding myriad leaves to rot,
The tree comes to rest after long life
In the bowels of an old cracked pot.

There beside it lies a sharp steel saw
Ringing, singing quietly all night.
In the morning past the window flies
A mysterious bird with wings of white.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


IN THE AUGUST SUNSHINE

The rye upon the hill no longer sways.
Beside us in a jug lies a sweet crust.
They pile new straw upon our bed of love
And our hot summer comes to end at last.

As red as whortleberries, glows the sky.
The evening sun's decease the well-cranes sing.
And never in our life will we forget
Those white poles standing at the wood's blue fringe.

For long, too, we will see the same old dream:
The constellations of white roadside flowers
And the white sheep that run across the lea
Further and further, like these years of ours.

No more will things fall into yours and mine
There, in the future where we'll share our plight,
Where the first autumn day draws to its close,
And where the poles aren't any more so white.

There, near the grey-tinged pole, beneath the rain
We'll press close in the sweet land of our birth
Where wounds open and heal equally fast
Leaving marks in letters and on earth.

Always the bees will sing there, in the heather,
And birches stand in lucid August light.
The sky is red, as red as whortleberries;
Our mothers pick those berries in its height.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


RETURNING FROM SUMMER

The trees have exchanged their last gossip about us,
The grasses have whispered their last summer charms,
And August shakes stars from the last of its midnights;
Like you scatter words, so it scatters its stars.

And now I know well: I would never be happy
If not for the sky and the green winter wheat,
The song of the lark piercing deep through my bosom,
The roadway dust settling white on my feet.

Is that sound from a tree or a violin playing?
Is it water that's cautiously drawn from a pond? –
All night to the summer earth peacefully sleeping
The moon sings a lullaby tender and fond.

Running up, a night animal looks in amazement,
From a hill, under alders, a brook babbles down.
And we two are the last souls returning from summer
Along the warm railway line back into town.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg

Born into a peasant family in the village of Putauskai, in 1957-1958 Jonas Strielkūnas studied Lithuanian philology at the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. His work was first published in 1958. His collections, Rowantree (1966), Wind in the Rye (1971) and A Bell Is Risen (1978) are marked by lyrical feeling, the symmetry of his melodious quatrains and a poetic treatment of the bonds between man and nature.