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