Gloria Mundi by Dmitry Legeza
It’s good to live in a little country,
To publish books on the state budget,
To receive awards presented personally by the Governor General,
or even the Prime Minister.
Give me that award, Mr. Governor General!
I write about butterflies and tulips,
When I could be writing, after all, about the hungry and the dead,
About prisons, or what a great idea it would be to make someone else Governor General.
Everything’s different in a big country:
You could write about butterflies and tulips, like Poet X,
Or about prisons and corpses, like Poet Y.
But there’s also Poet Z,
Who ripped his own head off
Marched for four hours, head in hand, around the town square,
And then nailed it over the door
Of you can guess whose residence.
The head evened opened its mouth
It probably declaimed poems in a whisper.
And the award goes to Poet Z,
Along with the silk ribbon of the Order of the something or other.
All Hail the Heroes!
Translated from the Russian by Paul Smith
Dmitry Legeza is a member of the organizing committee of the St. Petersburg Bridges international poetry festival. Dmitry’s poems have been published in poetry magazines in the US, Denmark, Israel, Columbia, Italy, Poland, France, as well as in Russian magazines and poetry collections.
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Wise, witty, words of warning to seekers of safety by insincerity.
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