Valery Brusov, 'The Coming Huns'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

The Coming Huns

“Trample their Paradise, Attila!”
—Vyacheslav Ivanov

Where do you stray, heavy Huns,
Who weigh on the world like a cloud?
Far, under Asian suns,
Your cast-iron tread is loud.

Swoop down in a drunken horde
From your dark encampments, rise
In a tide of crimson poured
Over this land that dies.

O slaves of freedom, pitch
Your tent by the palace gate.
Plow deep, dig wide the ditch
Where the throne shone on your hate.

Heap books to build a fire!
Dance in their ruddy light.
Foul altar steps with mire:
You are children in our sight.

And we, the poets, the wise,
From the onslaught that darkens and raves,
Defending the torch you despise,
Shall hold it in deserts and caves.

Under the scattering storm,
The tempests that raven and tear,
What will the hazards of harm
From our long labor spare?

All that we only knew
Shall perish and sink and grow dim.
But you who shall slay me, you
I salute with hosanna and hymn.

By Valery Brusov

Mia Leonin, 'Refugee (Baghdad 2003)'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Refugee (Baghdad 2003)

A child’s legs twitch, wired with the day’s last synaptic flickers.
Her body kicks and rolls into the C of sleep’s inevitable curve.

Beneath a newly named Pluto she sleeps—no longer a planet,
now simply a sphere, a smear on the galaxy’s conscience.

A mother kneels into the lamp light of the day’s last ablutions.
How will her missing hand groom the head?

She rubs her cracked heels with coarse salt and wheat chaff.
How will the linens trample themselves clean?

Daughter, your mother’s prayer teeth would sharpen
and shred your opaque sack of sleep.

She would chew you into her cow-belly vault, break you
into one of the earth’s invisible compounds with her rumen

if she could live to see what you will survive.

By Mia Leonin