* * *

Because your body is eternal as a word,
out where no one sees soul any longer,
it's like a mirror in showing the world
a person yielding to fate and throwing
his heart into the deep, as if to toss
a bodiless spirit at the feet of God
while universal elements that have no bloom
offer his live blood to infernal realms.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Angel of solitude, the fire is like a gateway
beyond which an abysmal sea opens and this
you wade into as if for the last time,
having drunk of the blood from its moon;
and there are no roads back, just as if
existence had vanished, reality burned up,
so you could never manage to open again
the sea that tore you from its womb and then
dropped you between non-existence and time:
you, the angel of solitude, destined to drift
the universe, and as a child of God to have
death betrothed to love for guidance.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

O angel, bleak is the reality of dreams:
on leaving footprints there, you'll go out
kicking against eternity's stream and get
to feel the mindless ardor of non-being,
though the body is stable enough to be a word
in that lonely hour, when God is after
you to pledge your life to Him: He will
show you a world the Lord has withdrawn from.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Naked as wind, a being without body
once it transcends its limits, this universe
reflects the soul – that peak of being –
and that, reflected in turn, has its blood
flowing in the hearts of white and fatal angels,
poets, prophets, slaves and deafmutes:
as the star God's tear has frozen into
at the blossom of fire from a tree that bears no fruit.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Gražina Cieškaitė was born in the northern region of Lithuania. She attended Vilnius University and has since worked as a lab assistant. A certain intensity in her work no doubt reflects the distress of severe instabilities in her life, some of which have had unfortunately tragic consequence. If the elegant desperation of these poems recalls a baroque metaphysic, particularly in their strictly argued, weirdly contrasted preoccupation with overtly religious themes, they still do not turn away from, nor ever find a way to go outside, an endemic anxiety that may ultimately come to survive our own time, if only in her concise presentation.