Express trains fly through the night
like golden tracer snakes through the woodlands.
A night magician shoots a deck of cards from one hand to the other,
and the rustling arch appears for a long second.
The naked dial plate of the moon,
the whole yellow ticking mechanism of it pulses,
and your thoughts walk in single file,
stepping in their own footprints left a whole year ago.
Moon wolves trot across the clouds.
You see their silky glowing paw prints,
and you seep out through the kitchen curtain
like a jellyfish through a wire mesh.
You feel the edges of someone else’s worlds and lives.
You walk on spider legs of hearing
into the warm inky tide.
Blue lions of a pride
walk around the purple savannah proudly.
They swear, laugh, drink beer near the pub.
Night doesn’t allow us to forget that we’ve come out of darkness,
and all of us are going to return to it:
the words are already read,
and someone covers them with the flat blackness, closing the workbook.
Electricity, light, rainbows, adds,
flashes of inspiration –
everything will go back to the velvet square one,
the square that is black and empty like the eyes of a fox in a black burrow.
But the marathon runner of humankind
is still running under the raining meteors, and his torch still burns.
Let embryos of worlds crumple in the wombs of hills,
and consciousnesses dissolve
like pink clots in dark acid,
but we can still get rescued.
You can chain your son with handcuffs of destiny to a departing train,
but your own passenger car was already detached from the locomotive
when you left school.
And the abyss between you and the future widens,
and you peer into the night
out of your kitchen window:
oh I still can jump over it, I’m still strong!
But the moon wasteland of the present day
with its unhurrying nomads of  events bristles,
and somewhere far beyond the pubs, beyond the woodlands,
night granular roads hiss like dragons…

(translated by Sergey Gerasimov from the Russian)

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Nation, The London Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Another Chicago Magazine, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.

Sergey Gerasimov is a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Among other things, he has studied psychology. He is the author of several academic articles on cognitive activity. When he is not writing, he leads a simple life of teaching, playing tennis, and kayaking down beautiful Ukrainian rivers. His stories and poems written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, J Journal, The Bitter Oleander, and Acumen, among many others. His last book is Oasis, published by Gypsy Shadow. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.