Ode to Snow

Krystyna Lenkowska

You fall like everything else on this planet

you come from silence
 
from where we also come
 
 

 you rest against freezing time and hard earth

 deer leave traces over you

 a dog sinks in you up to its ears with such obviousness

 in his eyes as if he had understood

in Slocina in the Carpathian foothills you’re the same
 
as in Turkish Kars
 
Herodot’s legend
 
geometry on glass
 
black ice on the road
 
our fragile bodies crash
 
in your glazed splendor
 
 

 under you love death and trash

 lightly patted over

fragments of rockets from Baykonur drop on your head
 
while you unshakable equilibrist lie
 
supine in the Altai mountains
 
 

 my white idealist.

 
Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough