INSOMNIA

There's nothing worse than a ban on dreams
when they lock up mirages in safes
and force you to renounce the moon to its face.

Neither hunger nor thirst bears any comparison
with the insomnia of reawakening monsters.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Like ghosts searching for shelter,
we happen on the abandoned homestead.

The old lady there, as she was losing her speech,
used to start by whispering: Our father...

The windows have boards nailed across them,
though there's not one chair, not one table inside.

Those who leave board up what's most valuable:
whatever it's impossible to carry away.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Our father
was a mountain eagle,
our mother a swan,

our shaman brother
read the stars ...

We eat
pine roots,
wear ornamental feathers

and gather the shells
of eggs.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



A JINGLE FOR THE EMPEROR

Great emperor of zombies,
immortal lord of the dead:
you live on earth and in heaven
and breathe down everyone's neck.

Great emperor of zombies,
immortal lord of the dead:
we glorify you, yet you view
each of us through cross-hairs.

Great emperor of zombies,
immortal lord of the dead:
once in a century you reawaken,
each time with a different face.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Love is the silence in which
I remember you and repeat you:

sealed in for the ages
in stone isolation to love you.

Impenetrable fog outside the window
is the hair of my love.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

O my eternal one,
I've been waiting
for thousands of years,
bent over the old
astrology
books.

I've created
many hymns
and cryptic charms,
all to get
you to stay
any way that I can
once you do arrive.

But can it be
I've been granted
mere seconds
to gaze on
your face
by the flare
of a match?

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

You ask how it happens that my footprints show
in the valley of shadow, where I've never been.

You ask why it is the moon looks
by my face into you.

I don't know: I simply sing
of a bridge that spans the stream.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



JUST AIR AND WATER

When the dream's uncertain divinity
swamps memory, I want to remember
what language we bloomed in, the day
we were just air and water.

I try to remember, but can only manage
to do so, once everything is forgotten,
when I wake up unable to recognize myself,
when I'm just air and water.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



EPITAPH

I'm like an illegible hieroglyph
engraved on a memorial slab,
kept from the dark by roses of sand
and the gentle hands of close friends.

Do not wake me from this torpor.
Let clear skyshifts envelop my sight,
since life on this earth only amounts to
my not being here.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Whether I was there, or just that
I was looking the moon in the eye,
as I walked along the river:
that I don't remember.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Valdas Daškevičius was born in Kėdainiai, smack in the middle of the country. He has published only one book. Since graduating from Vilnius University, he has worked steadily as a newspaperman. His work as a whole has a resonant, reflective minimalism in which the rhetoric shows itself to be deft, the vigor undiminished and poetic truth uncontestable. Each poem seems to advance securely by a pared-down logic of austere contradiction, in which only one side in the contending argument is spelled out. What is left unsaid still weighs in with all the urgency of a prayer that bears reiteration.