Debeljak Aleš:
Migrations

Everything, you see everything: the dimness of the  concert hall, dusty

violins hurriedly placed on the parquet, the breathing of flies,

a whistling teapot, a cartridge discharged into the dim dawn,

a carpet’s hunting motive, an inscription in the tongue of two prophets, things

that drown in endless light, cries which rise up to the sky,

the shine of metals, a basilica, the smell of a garden, the dark verse

of a sonnet, a column of children and weeping women, who

carry newborns in their wide skirts, a thin stream of plum

 

juice which soaks into the turned earth, trodden by retreating

battalions. Everything. The fresh tranquility of cemeteries, the painful metastases

of forests in which the known world will rattle to an end. Ancient order

 

of violence which returns to the hearth. How quiet the house is now.

The girls’ choir has fallen silent. But the track to the East will certainly remain.

No one can erase it. And you know that the steeple clock tolls for you and us.

Translated by Andrew Wachtel