The Passage

From that house on the mountain, whose name was Ark –
from the Ark, that had never emerged in the Torah –
there I went on the run, straight once cleared the dark,
late in summer in freеzе of the morning Aurora.

And descending this mountain, I passed by the ledge,
by the wives whose dark eyes were the gaping grief windows.
I ran down to the south, through the thickets of sedge.
And I left them behind – those lorn wives (or the widows).

So, I fled from the tyrant – the source of the plague:
at a dawn in late August, I ran out of breathing.
Past the grief, whose each eye was a gaping dark lake –
To the stream, to the river – whose name was Lethe.

I’ve forgotten, how long I pushed through, cut in blood,
wet with dew, rushing down through the forest thickets.
Those wives’ tears foreshadowed for me the flood,
and their eyes omened gaping pitch dark with crickets. 

It was when I arrived, that the night fell on earth,
mild, like hair of those wives – with the glossy tar darkness.
It would wrap up the valley, the river, and gird
all around. Just the moon would illume the damp pathways. –

Boards, half-drowned in the river, which made a great loop,
were the bridge, with a rotten dark grin in the water.
And I walked on this bridge. And I followed the group
of the refugees – man, and his wife and their daughter.

So, we walk. Step by step. Where to – we don’t know.
From the plague, from the flood – to obscurity’s offer.
But the water – it runs through the flat land so slow –
Its name is Yoknapatawpha.

Different Herods we flee. With the grins in the night –
different destinies tell us so many a fable.
But our torturers now are deprived of their might,
for the World Refugee has been born in the stable.

Tender is the night, though it’s cold, and one dreads for their life.
As we passage, the steam makes the picture unfocused.
Yet we’re teamed: me, the girl, and the man and his wife.
We are leaving, and with us is leaving August.

We'll be gone, without trace in the river to show.
We will not get away with the Golgotha’s offer.
But the water – it runs through the flat land so slow –
Its name is Yoknapatawpha.

THE ORIGINAL: http://stihi.ru/2023/02/02/9556