europe. ten funeral songs

europe will swallow me

I’ll become a european daughter

my life will be like

one of your many rivers

my sad europe

I wonder if your sadness

can equal my sadness?

do you have

enough room for my brain

for my carnivorous rats?

(my memory lasts as long

as the air in a 3-mm syringe)

but as for my face

is it more like a man’s than a woman’s?

the little children dead on our streets

or in our bellies poisoned and full of  passion

will they have a place where they can string their silent beads

where they can to gnaw on their fingers

where they can to hang their scrawny spines?

from europe. ten funeral songs, 2005

translated by  Adam J. Sorkin and Adrian Urmanov