Poems Translated into English

EVERYONE HAS EARS
EVERYONE HAS EARS
EVERYONE HAS EARS

THEY HEAR
THEY HEAR
THEY HEAR

EVERYONE HAS EYES
EVERYONE HAS EYES
EVERYONE HAS EYES

THEY SEE
THEY SEE
THEY SEE

EVERYONE HAS A NOSE
EVERYONE HAS A NOSE
EVERYONE HAS A NOSE

IT BREATHES
IT BREATHES
IT BREATHES

EVERYONE HAS FEET
EVERYONE HAS FEET
EVERYONE HAS FEET

THEY WALK
THEY WALK
THEY WALK

EVERYONE HAS HANDS
EVERYONE HAS HANDS
EVERYONE HAS HANDS

THEY PROTECT
THEY PROTECT
THEY PROTECT

FROM WHOM
FROM WHOM
FROM WHOM

FROM ME
FROM ME
FROM ME

WHO ARE YOU
WHO ARE YOU
WHO ARE YOU

I AM YOUR DEATH
YOURS
YOURS

I DON’T SEE YOU
YOU
YOU

THAT IS BECAUSE
BECAUSE
BECAUSE

I CAME TO YOU
TO YOU
TO YOU

TO SEND YOU
SEND YOU
SEND YOU

ALONG THE LIGHT BRIGHT PATH
ALONG THE LIGHT BRIGHT PATH
ALONG THE LIGHT BRIGHT PATH

AT THE END OF THIS PATH
AT THE END OF THIS PATH
AT THE END OF THIS PATH

I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU

I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU

I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU

TRULY THIS IS SO

Paris, 06.10.2024

The happy ones leave France
Leaving Nantes and the Loire Valley
Nice – the flowing Seine – Paris
And the Atlantic Ocean coast

You lived in Paris for ten whole years
Without immigrant crap dishes
Love saved you wonderfully there
Paris turned on the green light in your destiny

It was kind to you for a good ten years
The colour of its roofs – like the smoky sky’s course
You preserved it – like a talisman against troubles
A pledge of luck and love for all

Paris doesn’t want to know why a person is there
So fond of music – theatre – dancing
Paris is so beautiful – that one could spend a whole century
Silently admiring Paris alone

Paris gave me you again
Walks through Versailles, the theatres
And cigarettes with coffee in Montmartre
We smoked with all our happy strength

Notre Dame Cathedral
As before I fed
All the pigeons of the Latin Quarter
And we scattered sunflower seeds on the Place Notre Dame

So that joy would be passionately revived
Among the pigeons
Among us
Lovers and the living

Sublime Paris in its memories
Holds no grudge against those who settled there
And the grinding of the guillotine – the severed heads
Paris does not remember with a shudder

And the Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise
Lives – flourishes – without the guillotine, it becomes denser
Here, a famous man falls silent
And Paris also likes this very much

The estate – Notre Dame – a Gothic connection
And all the striving of thought to the heavens
The reeds sway – the wind has come
And, having dispersed the clouds, it cleared the abysses of the heights

And the stars in the sky – with the stargazing moon
Gave everyone happy prophecies
All cities without candy wrappers
But Paris in the evening – warmed by the lamps

We really love
For our chocolate projects
There’s coffee – like ink, warming the poets
In retro coffee cups

And you, like a coffee addict,
Fall in love with a girl that very evening
Who walks towards you
A completely Living Chocolate

Hot Coffee Candy

Mikhail Volokhov
2020

Sanyok, a brother from our neighbourhood, beat up everyone in our city
That’s why he was our main
our dearest centre-block gangster.

He was a light heavyweight in the boxing ring of our quarter – he forged victories
mostly with straight punches.
He knocked everyone out in the first round
and left them bleeding on the floor.
Out on the street, he had fifty knife wounds on his body from fights – two through-and-through.

With the last bloody one – from Tolyan
we dragged him in our arms for almost an hour – from the nearby local vacant lot – our Sanka.

To keep the blood from going inside his body – to keep Sanyok from dying before the hospital –
he fought for all of us so we

Alone remained
in charge in the city, the main ones
such wolves

Tolyan, the northern jackal’s biggest moron
He didn’t know a thing about boxing
That’s why he right away stuck a bayonet into Sanka’s chest with a grudge

But even with the bayonet in his chest
Our Sanka broke Tolyan’s neck with his signature blow – a clever hook.

Tolyan was already being taken away, like the corpse of a trooper,
from the northern wastelands
And our city, thanks to Sanka, was ours.

And Sanya recovered after a couple of weeks
And said so sternly-slowly:

Not a single northern Jackal – a vomiting trooper – will live on our land here anymore – swamp scum.

And every day we began
Beating the northern jackals with steel bars and knives
till they bled

And the northern jackals didn’t really resist
our bloody onslaught.
When Tolya pegged it in a fight with Sanka
They lost heart abruptly – the vile northerners

And we would have taken care of all the northerners, along with their snotty little brothers, so they wouldn’t take revenge – when our northern blood boys grow up – for their older brothers

Which, I repeat for the slow-witted – have already been torn apart and cut up almost all of them
We!!!!
But!!!!
Sanyok said – You mugs!!!!
Sicilians aren’t the mafiosi!!!!
Completely without Morals!!!!
Not Us!!!!
We’re Russian guys!!!!

I’m sure they’ll understand – then we’ll be the brave and right ones!
Fighters!!!!

What d’you think?

And we told Sanka!!!!
If the boys don’t understand their crap – those filthy northern bitches – then we’ll finish them off – sort them out!!!!

And the bitches don’t interfere any more
in our city squabbles
with their rules and lousy business!!!!

And two years later, everything turned out super
Sanyok fell in love with Tolya’s daughter – the Russian Alyona!
His favourite – since tenth grade!

And such a love blossomed between them.
Like in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ – by that there Shakespeare
Twins were born – a boy and a girl.
They were the same age

And they called Sanka and Alyona’s children
Juliet and Romeo after that author – that Shakespeare

That was the wish of Tolya’s widow, Olya – a school teacher
from the north, who taught drawing –
in memory of her done-for Tolya

Who called Olya ‘Juliet’ all his life, since school
and she called him ‘Romeo’ – in return

In short!
They made up!

We’re hoping to be friends with the northerners for a long time now –
like family, like blood brothers.

Plus, up there in the north, they have girls with firm and visible breasts
with absolutely royally spacious butts

Three blocks away, sex bombs
your eyes start firing at them

And so everyone must go through life for a long time – with love
and only forward, most importantly –
without looking back.

Where, in my opinion, there’s more than just darkness
but also love – so cool

And ahead – let’s hope –
everything will be like this again –
Shakespearean love, true – real
in people who are strong and solid

And you can hit the bitches in the face
in the snout with a fist, a sledgehammer, or a heel –
on the bitch’s nose – through their whole stupid brain –

Yeah, fuck

There’s no more ringing story in the world –
than the tale of Romeo and Juliet

Mikhail Volokhov
Paris, 2021

A soldier with a cold in a trench in winter, snow
Three o’clock in the morning, enemy tanks on the attack
The soldier has pneumonia, there’s no penicillin
No warm bed for him in the nearest infirmary

The soldier with a cold no longer wants to live
He spits blood on the snow as his temperature nears forty
The nearest enemy tank is 100 metres away
And with his barrel pointed at an infantryman

The soldier rises to his feet, advances to the tank with a grenade, smiling
And it seems to him that his beloved flies towards him instead of the tank
That he holds flowers in his hand and not a grenade
He wants so much to embrace his beloved

Even the tank is hypnotized and dares not shoot
T i me stopped the war for a moment of love for this soldier and the tank
But the next moment a shell flies from the tank and pierces the soldier’s breast
No penicillin, it’s no longer necessary

28.02.2022

The man who will die in my play
will first remove his skin and hang it on the chair

And the chair will say
shrugging its shoulders
your death is not my problem

The rose in a vase will intervene
and cite as an example the crystal vase:
I’m dying in the vase and the vase doesn’t care

it only gleams with all its facets
and the chair will say
those are your problems
Then the grumpy sofa will remember

Once a man stood on this chair with a noose at his neck,
and the chair rejoiced as it was kicked aside
and the man’s legs hung in the air
And the chair will say

JUST GO AWAY

The man who will die in my play
may remove his skin
but respecting the chair
let him throw it to the floor

The chair has its own problems
And after all
this is just
A PLAY

Paris, 1992

In an old village house –
on the bank of a frozen river –
on an unlit stove – lies an old woman
And wants to fly to paradise like a heavenly bird

Neither eats nor sleeps – three days – waiting for a neighbour
To chop wood
Ske’s frozen – Winter

Minus thirty-eight
But she wants to die –
that’s for sure

A book by Khlebnikov lies nearby
She opened it –
but doesn’t read it

Whispering to herself –
she was a Russian teacher –
in the past at school
With sad thoughts – her own poems

A plastic radio from her husband hangs in the corner
And chatters about minus thirty-eight in the yard
She’s all alone on earth, lingering

Military photos on the main wall of the house
A framed article from the newspaper Pravda
Tells about the heroism of her brother
In the Great Patriotic War – a soldier

An icon hangs just below this article
And below the icon is another framed article
From the year 1938
When our people – the enemies of the people – thirsted for blood

And killed all the kulaks – like countless murderers
Waited for the Morozov Pavliks

The old woman’s father – was then shot
Because he had a sack of grain – like a fist – for the family –
In the cellar

So as not to die in the winter –
for their village family – was large
The younger one – was gone already
She said goodbye to her brother during the war – barely alive

And this is her brother – in the year forty-one of the war
He died near Yelnya – like Matrosov
And there was an article about his heroism
in the newspaper Pravda

Now the old woman understands only one thing —
that Khlebnikov wrote novels in lines
He could have written a novel about her brother – in lines, too

That her brother – on that machine-gun pillbox –
the fascist – lay down – as if on a girl
So that she would continue to bear children for the country –
that lost so many people in the war and beyond

And that winter – she decided to leave in thirty-eight –
wiped out by attrition – that damned year
By cold and hunger – in that frosty winter –
minus thirty-eight

So that with this numerical and icy fact –
she could somehow ask forgiveness of her family –

And if Khlebnikov had lived –
and known about his brother’s heroism –
he would have written – she believes –
a most beautiful novel about him – a line

With this memory – of her novel –
The old woman flies away –
into the cold winter night

Overshadowing – Covering
Bullets Flying into Flesh and from Flesh
Sailor’s – Day
and Snowy
Night

Mikhail Volokhov
2023