Москва в 2012 году in English

Moscow Circa 2012

I have found a new pedestrian passage via  Tsvetnoy Boul'var (the Flowery Boulevard) inner courtyards to Karetnyi Ryad (the Horse-Drawn Carriages Row). A full-figure belle is walking towards Sadovoye Kol'tso (the Garden Ring) thoroughfare. The small Silver Age hat is a grand addition to her expensive dress of the bygone era of the last Russian Czar. I have willed this sudden beauty to enter the gate of the Hermitage Garden where my mother—on my request—arranged my wedding party forty winters ago. Incongruously, the dame doesn't enter the Paris-like park though she is attired to do just that. Evanescence rules!
I do enter alone, more like a wave than a particle of the Moscow milieu. The hundred twenty year old grounds are surprisingly well manicured. For the last two decades the second Russian НЭП— NEP (New Economic Policy) is in its full swing.  (The first was a short-lived one in the 1920s.) The art deco details nicely stressed; flowers are blooming on their tidy beds.
The new iron-wrought gazebo has been erected in front of the old theatre. The restaurant where our wedding took place is open. It has even been expanded by a new terrace. The patched up walls are covered with the imported Austrian paint. Two functioning theatres—one headed by a Russo-Jew and another by a woman*—beckon to the east and to the west of our exit/entrance into the brave and cowardly life. This Big Bang of sorts would pretty soon end in two separate whimpers.
(I still shudder recalling my inept blah-blah-blah speech there and then about the imported electric bulbs lighted for the first time in the second capital of the giant empire... I should’ve kept quiet.)
My gingerly walking daughter's family will be pretty safe in the white night glimmer of Moscow if they decide to join the mad metropolis carnival run by the movers and shakers of truncated Russia... For the young only, for the young only, the aged ones are told by some health care professionals, “You have lived your term; we got many sick children to care for.”**

sunless afternoon
on the White Sea shore
the bright yellow mushrooms

sunless afternoon
on the White Sea shore
the bright chanterelles

бессолнечный день
на кайме Беломорья
ярче лисички

или

в полдень без солнца 
на кромке лукоморья
жёлтость лисичек


или всё же, как Нета Эйси предлагает:

пасмурный день 
на кромке лукоморья
жёлтость лисичек

*) А это опять зевгма ( смотрите на стихи.ру стихотворение Zeugma Карине Саркисян и мою поделку “Любовь семитки к арийцу”).
**) Mary Buchinger and the New England Poetry Club workshop helped to anglicize my Runglish of the above haibun and to correct glaring mistakes.