LITHUANIAN GRAVES IN SIBERIA

The taiga burns with northern flames.
Graves grip crosses.
Above them, winging slowly,
Hawks glide – black hawks.

A storm climbs the sky,
Blows sound beneath the earth.
The souls of the dead are quieted
By the voices of their homeland.

There is enough dirt for bones.
Even more for ashes.
A bloody flower blooms
In eternity's palm.

Northern flames die on the taiga.
Graves won't let go of their crosses.
Over them, beating their wings,
Hawks settle, black hawks.

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



AT MIDNIGHT

Every star –
Eternity's dust –
Is silent.

Only the heart –
Universal presence – 
Is beating.

That is enough,
No more is needed –
Only to feel,
How a song slumbers,
Freezing into a snowflake...

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



PLEASE REST

Sit down, on a rock – –
We have come to the planet's edge,
To the limits of this earth,
To the heavens' infinity
Chewing on bitter crumbs – –
A long hungry journey.

A cold wind blows from the sea;
Hot gusts come from the desert.
And the sun, like a dandelion puff,
Descends and rises – –
Only you, rest.

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



THE SCREAM

Silence loves the mute rock.
Cosmos is carved out of silence.
Why do you feed the carnivorous beast?
To stop his howl? With the holy sun

Peace descends upon the orchards.
Now you kneel at the evening's source,
As all star-studded infinity
Shudders in your heart's scream.

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



A SKETCH OF A NATION'S AUTOPORTRAIT

I am a nation rooted in you,
I'm not a nomad tribe.
History has not uprooted me,
And death is but a toy.

I'm not a flaming grass blade of the steppe.
I am a flower of ice in the north.

Blown by God's breath,
I shatter into millions.

But again I am welded by kindred spirit –
It is me you receive at birth.

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



THE SUN OF LITHUANIAN FOLK SONGS

Only the sun of folk songs
Visits your grave
Day after day
Descending on frozen hands.

And those hands are – our entire nation – –
Opening towards the burning sky,
Lifting, from beneath the grass,
Like a precious stone, the heart.

Fire can't split it,
Crumbling it into white dust,
But as in ancient rounds,
Lifts it with the rising sun.

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



EXILED POETS

Exiled poets are – desert cactuses.
They receive no moisture;
Sand surrounds them,
Yet they grow and bloom
Spiny red blossoms.

The dust of fading years
fills their tracks;
Just the exiled poets
Remain,
Grow
And bloom
Tortured violet flowers.

When our hearts – yours and mine
Are pricked by a poem's thorn
Don't cry – –
Exiled poets are desert cactuses – –
They feed on our blood.

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



BARBARIANS FEAR

Barbarians fear the letter:
Burnt into the clay tablet of law,
Into the parchment of prayer,
Into a book of poems
And into the samizdat fragment
Of Holy Scripture.

Barbarians tremble before the letter,
That fends off the dagger,
Gently strokes the lyre
And resonates the word
In a hymn.

Barbarians ambush
And strangle the letter,
Trample its ribs under hoof
And toss it into flames.

But the letter lives –
Like a legendary bird,
It rises on wings of flame
And descends
On a prison wall
Inscribing – FREEDOM!

Translated by Jurgis Bradūnas



THE RIGHT OF THE LAST

I came to the tribe last –
They bedded me down by the threshold,
Far from the hearth.

Last to the tribe I came –
I sit far from the place of honor,
Near the milk crock.

To the tribe I came last,
But when, mother dying,
The door is opened,
I must step before her
With the embers into the night.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



BLOOD WEDDING

If, seeing your brother's blood,
You do not weep,
You can marry.

Watch where
The first drop falls.
Press it with your finger
Into the ground.

If, touching your brother's blood,
You do not weep,
You will be fertile.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



SUN RITE

You brought in the sun for me
Past the smoky door jamb –
Now I can hardly remember
How you knocked with a stone
At my cradle –
While all around, like a dream you'd lost,
Awakened the forests of Rominta.

Then you put the sun for me
Like a transfigured breadloaf on the table –
And the linen paled.
Then life's long
Ceremony began,
In which, like the censer's grains,
Smelled the blossoms of Rominta.

Where are you now, little sun,
Snuffed, carried out, buried?
Will I touch the earth with my forehead
Asking, can I
Knock with a stone
At your coffin
There, where late in the evening
Rustle the forests of Rominta.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



BAPTISED IN BLOOD

In my tribe's
First burial mound lie
All the young,
All the beautiful,
With wreaths near their hats,
Betrothed to death.

Who laid them there?
Why were they covered
There,
Where at the bottom of a dry spring
The earth's heart ruptures.

Take and hold
This white bone candlestick –
Don't breathe... Don't blow out
The blue flax flame.

Now
In my country's
Last burial mound swell
The grain of legends,
The seed of songs,
And baptised in blood
Come to life again.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



THE TREASURE HUNTER'S EVENING

There was nothing beneath the rock:
Not silver, not miraculous waters –
Only earth
Black as the night...

And so I sit
On an uprooted rock,
In the middle of the fields
Beneath the setting sun,
As the night rises
Black as the earth.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



THE WOODSPRITE'S LAMENT

Oh, who has felled you,
dear oak, my oak?
Who withered your green-feathered crest?
Alien, heartless gods?
Or bloodless hands?

I, I have failed you,
dear oak, my oak.
I did not shield you with my care.
In damp mists, in the autumnal night,
souls of the forefathers must lose their way.
Alas, your branches will not sough together
now, nor your leaves flare.

Translated by Clark Mills



THAT YOU NOT BE ALONE

I scrubbed the windowpane
Near your cradle
That stars should rise,
And risen, shed faint light,
That you not be alone,
Through the night alone.

I shall sway like a willow
By the level road
That a bird should settle,
And settled, sing,
That you not be alone,
On the journey alone.

Up the sad hill I'll go with you,
Like sand I'll flow away
That the wind should blow me,
And blowing, lull you asleep,
That you not be alone,
In the earth alone.

Translated by Jean Reavey



CRYSTAL

The flowering of the lindens
is over. Honey-gathering's done.
And in the granaries
of tillers of the earth
only a smell of wax remains.

Shorter the days. Colder
the time of work. And in the hot palm,
of the salt of sweat, only
a small crystal.

Translated by Clark Mills



A LULLABY FOR ME

At last
Time has stopped –
At last
The game has ended.
At last,
At last
Sleep, die out with the fire...
Sleep... die out... with the little fire.

Translated by Rita Dapkus



AFTER 60

After sixty years on earth,
When, it seems, I have already been
Both a skylark and a rock,
A tree and a kernel of grain
A slice of bread and a sip of wine,
There is something to be joyous and regretful about,
While looking at the smoke of a fire
Which is leaning toward the cold –
I start to be earth.

Translated by Rita Dapkus



TEMPTATION

From the steeple of St.John's bell tower
At your feet lies
A city,
History
And the present,
Life
and death.

Choose –
All will be yours:
Bread,
Honor
And domain –
If you bow to the idol
With your head held high...

But you take freedom,
Paying for it with your death.

Translated by Rita Dapkus



WHILE THE CHILD'S SUN STILL SHINES

God commanded me to be –
And I hang on
Like a tiny ant in the sand.
Around me are other little insects,
Bald and hairy,
And also a landowner's farm of worms is
A hole.

God commanded me to be –
To become weary and pensive,
To glance at the earth, at the sky,
And at myself
While the evening's sun still shines
Like a window
In a black ship of clouds.

Translated by Rita Dapkus



LET THE BLOSSOMS BLOOM

                  For Loreta and Jurgis

The river comes flowing
And brings with it a name.
Man comes forward
And brings with him a surname –
A toponym appears:
A cross is constructed,
Smoke rises from a chimney.
In this way Suduva was born,
Absorbed into our hearts.

A daughter comes forward
And brings with her a fire.
A son comes forward
And brings with him bread.
At the shore of another world,
In the shade of another sky
And another tree
A table is constructed,
A loaf is sliced –
Life begins.
Put your clasped hands
On the ancient table
And let the blossoms bloom.

Translated by Rita Dapkus



EXILE

Where did you put my father
Who wished to die at home?
Where are the mothers,
Who followed behind? –
At a distant shoreline
Lie their bones,
From Siberia and from Alaska
Blows only coldness.

I dig and dig and dig
The heavy fallow earth.
Birds collect
The scattered seed...

When I die,
Children, place under my head
The hard exile of your kinfolk,
And God will come and light
Every icicle.

Translated by Rita Dapkus



FREEZE

...time stopped suddenly, having slammed into nothing –
The black moon's crescent no longer slowly waned
And the cemetery sands stopped the rotting of bones.
The coursing river jelled, already choked by cold,
And the clear ford, like the eyes of the dying, stiffened
When the falling star fell but didn't fizzle...

...we stand, transformed into pillars of salt, wood, metal,
In the middle of the fields, without verdure and without wind,
Without day, without night, without the blood's turbid pulse –
The clearing sky with Thunder's distant hammer
And silver nails tacks poetry's heart to the vault of heaven –
O how hard it is to listen to the deepening muteness of the lark...

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



ODYSSEUS WAS IMPATIENT

Odysseus was impatient,
Nor could Homer delay any longer:
Raising the gates that barred his way home,
Where he quenched his thirst in blood.

For Odysseus
The twenty years away from home
Were a curse every step of the way.
My thirty plus I've dragged
Like a convict in chains.

Odysseus did get to see his native
Ithaca in the morning fumes.
My eyes grow dim while I'm underway,
Clearing only in dreams.

Odysseus, you came back to avenge
A terrible, twenty-year grievance.
I make no demands, feeling only an itch
In the would where my life was split.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



THE LAST OF THE ANCIENT PRUSSIANS

I can hear the dying Prussian,
The last one left alive,
Rambling on about Truso,
His ancestral town.

Amber shines by sunrise,
Water rocks its waves;
While language is a bell
Ever fading, on his lips,

Never to be reawakened,
No one's, ever, to own.
Each word I touch is frigid.
Language, you are gone.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

Even with no sun, there is a shadow;
With no wind, the forest whispering.
One tiny lark, in dead of winter;
Roaring waterfalls, in a desert.

So it goes, my whole life long,
With no break or rest:
While I know none of it is possible,
I'm walking a wave's crest.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



ALONG THE HIGHWAY

The small stream stands for calm
Below the roaring highway's overpass,
As the rock represents stability
And grass a vital force.
But what of the human?
What else, besides highway noise?

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



THAT THEY WOULDN'T COMPLAIN

I hear my parents
in Holy Redeemer Cemetery
talk to their relatives
also in sand already
in Siberia, Lithuania, Pennsylvania...

How to cover them all
with the earth of their homeland
that they wouldn't complain to each other?..

Translated by Lionginas Pažūsis



THE FIRST RANDEZVOUS

So Be It

Where will you place
Sun, earth, water? –
It'll burn you, bury you, drown you. 
But you touched
Chaos's cloth's tangled threads 
And hurt everything, deeply, 
When you said: So be it.

And I hear
How the stones rattle 
And I feel 
My spirit tremble 
And I see
Someone etching a burning arc 
Into the black
Depths.

Flames burst pupils
Turning the canvas green – 
Let me be close, 
Burn it, Fire,
When the trembling heart shouts: 
So be it!
So be it!

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



SUN SONNET

Allegro

You worship fire
In the tradition of the ancients,
I only blow on an ember, 
Scatter sparks over the hearth – 
Smoldering words.

But the spark becomes suns, 
And we – ashes, only 
Your deception remains 
Your reverie,

Unreachable and unknowable, 
Inextinguishable, like Gabija
Sowing gold grains among the stars, 
Ripening them in the heart.

- - -
Gabija – The Lithuanian goddess of fire and the hearth.


Andante

You are space, melted by heat,
The heavens thundering force, 
I am a stone, awoken
On earth's first day by sudden lightening.

Sunbeams cause havoc in my head, 
Burn out black blots
Sunbeams splatter your boiling color 
Onto me ...

And we both melt, inflamed,
Thirsting for the same.
Not having yet said even one word,
Not having yet even believed in miracles, 
We stand before the cradle of thought.


Scherzo

Having become butterflies and flowers
We scattered before sun's spring –
And we believed – as in a fragile fortune in 
Medicinal grasses
And the holy river.

Oh and the evening's calm –
The universe's heart open.
While the sunset would smolder away, 
While there were no dark shadows, 
We strew butterflies and flowers 
Before sun's spring.


Finale

Already we recede, recede, away
From sound and from light.
We – the drowned at the bottom of the universe 
And kings with crowns of dew.

Already the final embers
Turn to ash in the pupils of the blind, 
And words did not recover their voice 
Entangled in a spider's web.

Who will blow into the damp fireplace, 
Who will make a bed for fire, 
When on a cold, icy night 
We can't call her in out of the cold?

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



THE FIRST FUGUE

I

Lay me down like an infant, 
Cover me with the brilliant sky, 
Wake me with the midday wind, 
Rustling between the pines.

I want to sleep and sleep, 
Dreaming your dreams,
And to roll the earth in my palm, 
Like a little black bead.


II

How you do torment me,
When we are alone – 
I do not want color,
I do not want sound – 
Leave me up on the hill 
Between Autumn's clouds... 
Why do you torment me so? 
You come like a storm, 
You shake me
As though I were an apple tree 
My thoughts fall to the ground 
Like raw apples,
And although my ears have grown deaf, 
Beyond them over in the deep 
You yourself play a mournful fugue. 
Everything spreads like berry stalks... 
Everything is already ash, ash... 
Oh, how you torment me...


III

You took my voice away like a bell 
Knocked from its belfry into the depths. 
Between us there is no gap – 
One heart for two.

One. Oh, when the goblet splits, 
I cannot resist the fire, 
Touching the flood's quiet, 
I am drowned by it...

I am drowned and I wander 
Among the coral like a blind fish – 
Between you and me ice 
Freezes and fire burns.


IV

I am blind and I search for you. 
Stretching my fingers out before me, 
I touch only the constellation's edge. 
Who will bring us together again, 
To sit awhile on a stone, 
Listen to the stream's water, 
The sun's voice talking, 
When all around is dark?

I don't want, I don't want to be blind 
On such a warm summer's night, 
When the heavens are breaking 
Under the weight of stars, 
And they fall onto my shoulders. 
I only want to find you. 
And I listen – beneath birch bark, 
Beneath the bread crust, 
A hidden heart beats...


V

And you woke me like an infant.
Pulling back the brilliant sky,
You released a white cloud
Trapped in some branches.

No one can sleep anymore –
The bell rings in the mountains.
I melt like the snowy fields,
Rolling the spring sun
In your palms.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



A POEM CATCHES ITS BREATH

A poem has to catch its breath,
Just as living calls for rest:
You have to sit down
Even if only on some rock,
Lean back against the trunk of an elm
And, at the first hint of a breeze,
Close your eyes.

It's then that poetry
Sneaks up on inaudible steps,
Covers your eyes with words
And begs you to guess.

You keep guessing, guessing and guessing,
Till the ultimate YES.
Then the poem before you
Deftly regains its breath.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



POETRY RODEO

While God cut me loose
To believe and to question,
People brought on Pegasus.
That made me turn equestrian.

Sure, mounting up is a cinch:
One step throws you in gear.
The whole goal of rodeo's how
Long you'll hang in there.

And I held tight, for all my chills,
Even slipping in the spurs.
Thank God, you never saw
Me taking any spills.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Born in Vilkaviškis in southern Lithuania, Kazys Bradūnas is considered a living classic, both in Lithuania and in the Lithuanian émigré community. Bradūnas left Lithuania after the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1944, interrupting his studies in Lithuanian Literature and Linguistics at Vilnius University. During the post-war period he lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, where he completed his studies. Later he emigrated to the United States, where he settled in Baltimore, Maryland. Bradūnas was the founder of the "Žemė" (Earth) literary movement – a movement advocating Lithuanian poetry with distinct roots in the earth, drawing its strength from Lithuania's agricultural heritage and folklore. During his time in exile Bradūnas published sixteen collections of poetry, edited substantial Lithuanian émigré literary journals, and was one of the major driving forces behind émigré intellectual life. Today Kazys Bradūnas and his wife Kazimiera have re-emigrated back to Lithuania, and live in Vilnius, where they are active in Lithuanian artistic and cultural life.