translated by Inna Pertsovskaya
ACHAEAN HORSE
(response to Alexey Tsvetkov's "Achaean song")
The poet starts his speech from afar…
Marina Tsvetayeva
I
This verse is masterful but sort of out of place.
Like everything, a metaphor can fail
When keen to please, our buddy takes up chase
At anything the market can avail
As a handy reason for feeling right
For a soul seeking limit of its flight.
I must admit: the poet is good
And music of his verse is nice and fair
But still the truth commands me that I should
Placating Higher reason - be aware
Of sirens' luring song, the frills ignore
To rectify the metaphoric flaw
The drowsy waters' roar contravene,
Restoring the rainbow o'er the Oikoumene.
I guess that Paris was a fretful swine
When brought his native kingdom to decline
For mere sex. The gods' conceited thirst
Made jar of human sins fill up and burst.
Its shards fly over making world inhale
Sweet poison of Greek enchanted tale…
The simple tunes of the blind kitharode
Caress the ear of the whole world
Lulling it to a thousand-year sleep.
His ethnic muse's magic goes deep
Making the human soul worship war
Embodying lust and blossom heretofore.
The man is deaf to Thanatos's tread
When savage call of evil in his head
Becomes delicious weave of gentle lore.
III
And still, my friends, I am sorry to admit
That we despite our culture, pride, and wit
Are mere Nature's miserable creatures
And our existence here features
Not even dire earthly mortal faults
But ever-present minor nuts and bolts
The pawns of Darkness at the feast of looting
Eternal dance of splitting beastly booty
Of territories, wheat and oil and wealth
Traditionally called politics-not stealth
This word has quite a decent sound
But makes a human crouch to the ground
And while care is taken of the flesh
The homeless soul gets caught into a mesh.
IV
We straighten history to follow the line
All eager to distort the real events
We run the ranks of fakes against the time
To snatch a period that suits us fine
Embodying deadly slogan "NOW AND HERE"
That lures us to a blissful nowhere
Where we treat our loves without gloves,
Bite off the space and chew it with delight
Ready to live on ephemeral spite
Or rather on a merciless virus
Blood-thirsty builder of the world empires
That makes one neighbor kill another
And trusting fundamental laws of nature
Be in his turn duly eaten by his brother
We snatch a glimpse of world and that is that
Indifferent to what has brought us here
And who we are - Our healthy mindset
Turns us into hard-hearted jumpy gnats
V
Of all conspiracies, I recognize as true
Just one that won't ever lie to you,
As although obscene, porn seldom lies
About life in human paradise.
That's history I mean. It's doing well
As a conspiracist. And it has wed
The God and chance keep Nature's secrets tight
And lay us a long and twisting path to tread
It starts in in heaven but it ends in hell.
Oh, history! It's Darwin's full discretion-
The simians' test site. It's a delight
To follow the primates' mind progression
When filigree of conscience is in fight
With tipsy ape. When light of thought is shed
And tries to stay in a bewildered head
To keep the man from sliding back to dark
In an attempt to please his simple chums
Traditionally favoring the night
Who their brother's seeking for light
Treat like a treason to the mother Earth
Blood-soaked, soft and from its birth
Indifferent to craving for a change
And passion of light to spread the light
To make immortal both world and body
?So that all the words and deeds were subject not to laws of nature
But rather to sublime human order
So that the caveman background
Could no longer limit all around
Repeating dully "Don't mind the Death"
Defying it is just the waste of breath"
Death's omnipotence simple and unending
Commands us to habitually rot
And disappear dutifully bending
To verdicts given by all sorts of gods
Just nourishing hypocrisy and blight
Of all descendants that appear might,
Their low meekness in the face of pus
And sewers that the Chaos pours on us…)
Beloved dead! We'll burn you or bury
Your ashes will be scattered or kept
In perfume bottle after we have wept
Absolve us of childish sins we carry
And we will put you happily to rest
And your memory will never die
If you provide us with diversion booze
Which will placate us, tickle and amuse
And put the truth as filling into pie
And hence our great covenant will shine:
You have agreed, enlisted, fed and doomed
And "tons of bronze" since now will be thine!
You are our idol of the latest breed
After the Titans, Zeus and mythic kings
Descended from great Orpheus. We bring
You as an offering, a lamb of absolution
Redeeming filth of darkness that we relish
Like children. Sacrifice to our childhood
For us to kill you and return to dance
With souls innocent, despising real life
We worshipped one true god, or, better, goddess
Which does not ask for brains and enjoys
Our crowd basking
In sweetest sea of sensory delights
Rushing into arms of one another
in all-consuming joyous copulation
Of all with everything to hide away from death
Through death-in-love to flee to that Great Womb,
To darkness, which is our carnal mother
You should, therefore, be meeker in your claims
To us – the children or spawn of Chaos
Afraid of our own mirrored face
As of a ghost from our resting place
What can we do if we forever seek
Not even heaven – the nirvana doze
When we – so tired and so weak-
Will drift daydreaming and forever flee
From wicked choice "to be or not to be"…
You strove to get away and called us with you
Not really knowing what you can call your home
So take your monument and stand
In only immortality at hand
And we…we'll trend the beaten track
And rot as usual –vain, tired, idle
And covering the chasm under our life
With you, our misbegotten idol
The pitfall cover made of slimy fraud
Is our only gift to the creators
Informing us that trap below awaits us
And there we are falling overboard!
The narrow-minded knower of science,
Imagination cleverly suppressed
Plucks up his courage: "You can place reliance
On you our death. But what of it? Stay blessed
With joy of instant. Take from life the best
And all the rest be damned. We cannot break the rules"
But there are no rules at all. We are the fools
Whose life despite all trenching
Is actually constant chaos-frenching
We have exchanged God for Nature's wraith
By science pushing out the hopes of faith
And stayed the same babies in the wood
With nothing learnt and nothing understood
By every effort made in deed and word
We'll change focus and may grow wiser
Perceiving Nature as a half-cognizance
And memory. Imperfect is the world.
This insight like an arrow in flight
Will whiz through time back and cast the light
On us and everything.
This will upset the Nature's applecart
And give us chance of talking heart to heart
VI
The looting which I mentioned from the start,
Dates back to dark Darwinian era,
Or, more precisely, to the same stone cave,
Where all gorillas mine gems to save.
The history is only form of looting
And Fukuyama made a great mistake
When struck his head on politicians' fake
Assuming that a human can escape
The unavoidable law of nature.
Survival of the fittest makes it favor
Some species as it modifies the rest
And this will go on until the caver
Becomes a human at his fuzzy best
And in himself will duly see reflection
Of that eternal image of perfection
Who on the stone tablets long before
Inscribed ten rules of the divine law
For men to be distinguished from the beasts,
To cut their kinship with the totem bear
And stop devouring their near and dear
The history occurs beyond the reason
It is the mutual plague and mutual treason.
VII
The God has ruled and Marx had let it go
The Trojan horse was masterful and cunning
Device to press Troy [5] out of the running
To pave path for the capital flow
And no longer bar the Hellespont [6]
From eastward moving arrogant Achaeans.
The ones with bells and whistles more impressive,
More numerous, more fateful, more aggressive,
More ready in the nature to dissolve
To raid the others and themselves absolve
Erecting power like doom over the world.
It was begun by Argonauts as scouts
Then Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush [7]
And after him the Romans blossomed out
When marched their way from Britons to Artsakh,
Then Bonaparte [8] playing antique hero
Was planning taking India from Brits
And Hitler's crooked solar flare
Eurasia like rye was ready to reap
Wherever blind force takes over
There prowls the beast, intruder leads assault
There even serene and tender Poland [9]
Seized Moscow its khanate to exalt…
There the Third Reich and Third Rome in their battle
The blissful West dumped in the hell of war
The same West that waved aside its gore
And never ever now or before
Admitted all its deadly sins galore
Against the alleged God's command
It simply flourished and continued to expand
We are spiritually robbed by war,
Which switched the cloth off European table
With all its humanistic fancy foods
To feel our loss we are no longer able
Gas chambers burning up the evolution
Have been forgotten and across the life we scud
As if neither Christ nor Buddha had ever died
And the twentieth century did not reek of blood
The bills and banknotes weave our space
And memory is no hindrance to bliss,
As daily routine blinds our eyes
And maintains the semblance of success
And although the prophet of the past
Declared "We are the third Rome and the Fourth will never be"
Deeds are more eloquent than proud words
And what had happened could not fail to happen
America's the third Rome-and-Reich renowned
It combined the virtues of its forefathers
And drove on like instrument of fate
To fleece the world of everything it's won
This Rome is the last, there will be no other
The homesickness of peoples everywhere
Will sooner bury the existing one
The Latin ghost has been devouring us for two thousand years,
In which we worshipped a sheer brute force
We are its child (a sign of mutual death!)
And are the prisoners of our own prison
Treading the steps of imperial brigandage
We launched attacks towards sunrise most of all
And, pushing aside the voice of God
Embittered the entire human race
The blind force marched against the sun
In false attempt to defend the God
The star of eastward land grab lured and tempted
From westward must be easier to paw
Only the Golden Horde attacked the East
But Moscow managed to pare its claw.
This victory didn't do it any good
Its vesper brother it rejected right away
Though Russia rescued Europe from Mongols,
Who will rescue it from Europe today?
My question builds rhetorical suspense
And shifts the focus to the western bound
As Europe has long relaxed and sound
Asleep- impervious to change and its sense.
The western unity of Rome-and-Reich
Is writhing making whole world to writhe
The wreckage of evil by every our step is doubled
We'll have to clear together this endless trouble
Emergence of an ever-stronger horde,
Which the antithesis has sharpened and restored
Provided faint hopes that Achaeans
Will come to reason when almighty Allah
Presents the problem making it more clear
And will assuage the all-embracing fear
Of being burnt in global conflagration
It's not a petty public bricolage10
And quest to Cordoba began by 'Umar11
Is turning now to worldwide barrage
VIII
It's time now to return to Troy
When mist of centuries has somewhat cleared
And we can better see the vile beast
Rampaging through Pangean spaces here
The Trojan horse, the old age-mate of Moses
Stands at the origin of western times
And to the world it clearly exposes
The treachery wrought not only by Achaeans
But that of all the other western tribes
Unsheathing their swords against the East!
Credulity, conceit and superstition
Made Troy an easy prey for Ulysses' trap
Gods vanished, heroes have perished,
Earth's gravity removed them step by step
This definitely brings to mind Aeneas
Gods' vengeance was to bring him up and rear
The retribution threatened proud Achaea
Who were doomed to pay for their bloody snare12
Aeneas's descendants had created Rome
Which gave Mars a rather handsome yield
Super-Achaea13was its power to wield
Over the world while Achaean Ares
One-time Alexander could afford
And nobody else. Too bad for Greeks
The fate abused them and Socratic hemlock
Was no help. For Rome
The Greeks remained East and only East
Sunset – land grab! And eastern picks
Are frail and always vanish altogether.
Hold-up when it's ephemeral and quick,
Won't be able to keep the loot forever
The West is different. It paves with its loot
The Roman road that doesn't lead to God
As God lies bound in their posh car boot
Preserved alive just for unlikely case
That it will serve ID if something goes to wreck
And the dark world's tender to our pack
Wherever it's in need – produce the common token-
In which the spirit of hope is crystallized and woken
By heavy press of all preceding ages…
The robber-architect was also summoned to cater For Mammon's market seeking for creators
In childhood centuries, gods on their own
Blessed gangs for fraud, and robbery, and plunder
They harshly judged the common people under
But turned their minions to heroes of high renown
Great culture did not fail the mankind
Encouraging the man to serve the loot
It glorified the hardest-nose thugs,
Instructing youngsters taking their path
To steal eternity and be its rightful heirs
Stockpiling kudos of the generations-
That’s how human childhood
Cognized the paths of sacrosanct heroics
From age to age a brilliant example
Of robber hero felicitous and blessed
Impressed the public with a sham of quest
And huge rewards- chimerically ample
The peoples revered him as if he were God
New citharists one after another trod
In glorifying common self-conceit
And listing records of victories
So Alexander was inspired by Achilles
So Caesar admired Alexander
So Bonaparte broke the way to Egypt
And merged with Caesar at the pyramid
They were overwhelmed by sign of ageless greatness
The gift of Cheops and the site of his remains,
World's navel, crown and certification
That conquered world you hold in your hands
And your plod from sunset hasn't been in vain
Undoubtedly, fiery Adolf
Had surely remembered Bonaparte
But still forgot him - and the mocking time hand
Made their paths converge in one ill-fated end On global map.
As India set limit on Iskandar14
Those two were smashed by woken Russia
There is always finis for children's bloody rushes
You cross the line and you are in for a blight
As if even the Fate defended common right
Of every living thing to live and breathe
Your reason, Caesar, was dried up by glory15
And retribution brought on you was gory
But powers of evil disregard
Conclusions, findings, and revelations
That's why they are evil, dark, and blind
Continuing the rite of ravage
All steeped in history and interest of nations
Resembling predators whose joint mind
Is wandering in hue of self-assertion
Producing constant narcissistic noise
Not consciousness but merely survival-
Their inertia is aimed outside
When your neighbor isn't good for food
He should be burnt in any sort of fire
And that's the dream of natiobiota16
To make the geosphere be itself17
The secret services are holy, that's their job
In godless world one's own to extend
And somebody other's to destroy
Society is mooring to the cave scheme-
The very soul of ever simple nature
When one biota struggles with another
Not recognizing other's right to life
When any tribe has alphabet concocted
It cherishes a dream of being great,
Desiring the satraps of its own,
That can all earthly reaches aggregate.
On the horizon, there's glowing Rome -
Eternal sign of conquering the globe.
Seeing power as purpose epitome,
When any other power's its foe.
Coat of arms, flag, rods, elections, rights,
Imperial chief in president's disguise,
And falsely humanistic slants and rants-
That's democratic path, the time grants!
But capital would never bear a rival,
On top there's ethnicity survival,
The tribe pays tribute to the hosting state
Taking imperial nonsense as a bait,
Or, more precisely, heaping trash from cave
That's eager to merge clans and them enslave
To put it brief, the age of passion seeks
To clutch the world in amiable grips
And squeeze its juice to bring it back to nature,
Keeping man's balance with every beastly creature …
The past appears to regenerate
And tramples brazenly on all that is alive,
Troy's here again, Achaea's standing by
And the proverbial horse already lies in wait.
The Trojan horse is just a major error
It is Achaean! Trojan is a fake
Invented to deceive and to abuse
Repeating ever-being history remake.
Remake, my friends! It's where the dead can score
And masterfully choke us, the living,
Making us play another person's role
And breaking up our living soul...
The whole world is again the joust
of Gods
Right, not the Gods they used to be before
But passions are the same and they gnaw
And shove over conceited haughty serfs/slaves,
Confusing often power with freedom
And ever keen to tear earth apart
Devouring the space as tasty morsel,
And merging crime with experiment,
Like beasts, they mark the ever traveled path
With their own filthy excrement …
Now the Lord, who is well known to have died,
In darkness blesses this amusement ride:
Achaeans heading forces of goodwill! -
And humanism, allegedly deceased,
Believed in their self conceited phiz,
And handed them the same fabled olive..
Achaeans push ahead and keep persuading,
Claiming their raid to bring us common good
And their legions the noble peace to exude.
The impudence of might leave us amazing,
We grunt, but still are keen to imitate –
And cursing out still we curse our idol.
And it is creeping like medieval plague,
A threat of people's blood degeneration
That turns a human being into a bot.
The trouble is not that getting their way
They'll make us just a part of algorithm,
But that the death for ever is here to stay …
For us it is na;ve to think
That's it's enough the lexicon to shrink
To make the word of "death" be vanishingly rare
For us the gentle children's ears to spare,
And we will reach the sought humane age–
Instead we get a self-deluded creche,
That wants to live by laws of fairy tales:
-To bloom in bliss like grasses in the dales
Amidst eternal spring. But even grasses
are crushed by lawless boots when cannibal Horde
Invades the dale abhorrent and abhorred
...
Achaeans push ahead and Troy they vilify
Because it keeps its borders fortified
That it is shockingly unwilling still to die
And what Acheans never will forgive-
Has every reason to thrive, breathe, and live.