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V mov.: The Moons of Saturn (Saturnalia)
Three little girls grew tired
in Balashikha but not the short-sighted
omnipotence of the conservative
former minister freely promising
happiness to everyone,
even to billions of Chinese and Indians
(then he dies like a dog like everyone else):
the same promise made to a handful of Jews
(all of them dead and buried generation after generation)
by a god counting minutes and money.
If ever there were such a god, he would deserve
to be dead, extinguished not in embers,
but in ashes, consumed and fallen upon
the shoulders of righteous people.
Under an iron sky of uniform clouds
with the colour of a hostile glance
(no Ovid ever saw any like this)
what is permanence, the memory
of wrongdoing, the justice of history,
the mockery of an exile’s lament?
and what value do you read in the landscape,
the eye distracted, the step oblique,