Этот воздушный транспорт (Вероника Долина)/en

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Air transport


Here’s the air transport,
There’s an indifferent voice:
“Karaganda — Frankfurt”,
From pole to pole.

Women, children, old people
Rush to their Ithaca,
It’s frightening, mein Herz, frightening,
But at least it’s not by stagecoach.

A bird’s tongue flutters
In a child’s colicky cry,
Goethe has forgotten them,
Rilke left them in the lurch.

They learned the Kazaki language,
They should have learned Nenets —
And it’s all how they do it back home,
And it’s all in German.

Pale are these faces,
Poor are these rags
They’ll have to toss them out in Moscow
On Sheremetevo’s gangway,

And victoriously they read
The fine print on the ticket.
They lived in darkness and poverty,
But children were born anyway.

The dull chatter quiets down, though
The timer still ticks,
“Karaganda — Frankfurt”
Let the liner fly away.

Though I stay in the frames,
My compass is out-of-whack,
Karaganda — Frankfurt,
Karaganda — cosmos.
Karaganda — Frankfurt,
Karaganda — cosmos.


<1989>