By Sasha Chorny

 (1914-1917)

In the corridor stretchers form a long tail...

And all eyes melt down

Into one begrieved and alarmed gaze, -

There, behind the white door, lives a red hell:

The knife, like a filing saw,

Whelps over bone, -

 

And its sharp pitiful animal yell

Stabs the heart, like a bayonet...

While there, across the window,

A May Day plays away.

 

And wouldn't it be nice to live

In such a beaming world!

The houses - fields, and mom, wife, kids, - 

And the shadows darken across palest of faces.

And there, behind the door,

A bony surgeon,

Blood-Splattered,

As if under a dotted veil,

And with sleeves rolled up,

Punctures evil-odored meat

With the sharpest of steels...

And pieces of bone,

Wild and strange,

Keep sticking out,

As if screaming in pain.

 

The nurse's chin trembles,

The spell of chloroform -

Like sweet vodka,

On the table

Where motionlessly yellows

An unhappy

Corpse…

And now, an orderly from Pskov,

His eyes averted,

Clamps down a naked leg ineptly,

And stares  -  as if drunk  -  at a shelf...

 

On the floor shamelessly reddens

With a fresh disjuncture a thigh.

A bucket stands high   with blood and pus...

The distance turns green  behind the glass:

A pair of doves coo

Walking side-wards along the cornice.

The Warsaw sky - a translucent chasuble -

Gets more and more covered in blues...

The exhausted surgeon

Walks up to the window,

Hungrily fumes with a cig,

Remembers his dear Petersburg

And gloomily tosses over his forehead

The gathered-up hair: Hard prison labor!

They are bringing them in today like logs,

Bringing and bringing, and all to no end...

- Between 1914 and 1917