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Maria Stepanova
Translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse
Pale blue and a flag inside, can’t see which one.
Living people, two, chase a ball. A live one
In a cook’s apron stretched across his belly,
Holds a white cigarette by the café’s back door.

A woman, glasses perched upon her living nose.
Living dogs are straining at the leash.
Airy summer shirts, light jackets,
As expected of the living, billow in the wind.
Nothing gives away the place where all this is going down.

Here no one lies facedown in water, no one
Inexplicably refuses, in
Violation of all the rules of decency,
To get up, revive, rejoin the world of the living.

Even the ball, look, it doesn’t lie, it bounces.

 
May 24, 2022
from the journal WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
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I don’t really know what to say about the poem (the circumstances of its writing)—they are just too obvious. The poem was written in June 2022.
 
Illustration in gold, dark brown, white and black of lines over fluttering pages
"Which Poems Help in Hard Times?"

"When my husband was in a hospice, I brought him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems. I read to him 'The Raven,' which has wonderful images and language. When one of our kids came in and saw what we were doing, he said there was a 'Simpsons' Halloween episode where James Earl Jones narrated the poem. We pulled it up on his television and watched it—hilarious. It was a wonderful respite from a very sad and difficult time."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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Cover image of David Perry's book of translations, The Odes of Horace
What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on David Ferry's The Odes of Horace


"The genius for a simple clarity is what makes all of Ferry’s Horace and Virgil so commendable, and his verse is proof as well that 'simple clarity' is not 'economy,' nor less and stranger language. That he adds a word or removes a god is hardly worth attacking when the former makes for grace and the latter is a name we neither cared about nor said correctly. Instead, like the King James translators, he understands that another language is another material, and one cannot build a wooden house from marble. The attempt will last forever."
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