VARIO BURNOS

NIJOLĖ MILIAUSKAITĖ

Poems

Nijolė Miliauskaitė was born in 1950 in Keturvalakiai, a town in the southwestern region of Lithuania which is known as Suvalkija. She attended boarding school in the nearby city of Marijampolė, studied Lithuanian language and literature at the University of Vilnius, and worked for a time as an editor. She lived for many years in Druskininkai, a resort town in southern Lithuania, where she was instrumental in supporting the career of her husband, poet Vytautas P. Bložė. She received many accolades for her poetry as well as important literary awards and prizes, among them the Jotvingiu Prize in 1999 and the Lithuanian National Award for Literature in 2000. She died in Druskininkai on March 25, 2002, two months after her fifty-second birthday.

SILKWORMS

do you hear? it’s like warm summer rain tapping against

the glass when you sleep, or perhaps against the tin of the roof, the whole

day – on this farm

silkworms are raised

the landlady meets us at the door

with a smile, light and radiant

a child, holding onto her apron, stares

at you, give him a handful of treats

silkworms, all forty

days, forty nights, their caterpillars

only eat, only swallow their fodder – silk tree

leaves, collecting their raw material reserves

for their factory

then a silk thread – the landlady shows you – the thinnest

they wind around themselves, in perfect octagons, by heart

so carefully, so neatly

the thread weaves together, moistened with glue, into a cocoon

threads threads weave together

make the cloth just last forever – sing children walking in a circle

in my head each one shouting louder than the next

and there

take a good look – for the rest of your life – a silver spool

in my hand, reminding me of a white dove’s

desiccated egg – is this not a secret of the gods

I stare at the incomprehensible

hieroglyphs

carved into my palms

I listen to the silence in myself – thickening

resonating, golden

I don’t know how I could ever thank those

I have already been

once upon a time, in the repeating cycle

of birth and death

all those, the unknowns, the unfamiliar

is it not their lives – difficult?

erring, searching – that push

me along this road

TIME TO TRANSPLANT

this spring I will have to transplant, it’s time

already, the aloe, old, overgrown

the aloe vera, valued without end

by experts and esteemed because it has

so many healing properties hidden secretly

inside it

so many roots! so many grown together, so many

I can’t

pull it out, no matter how I try, I grab a stone

and break the vase

but why

do you hold so tightly to the clay, why do you hold on

cutting into the wall, with all your strength, stubbornly

don’t tear, don’t scratch my hands

could you have grown fond?

of this prison, cramped and meager, where you lacked

water and food, the new vase

is ample, more spacious, more beautiful!

my soul, do you hold on too so strongly

cutting yourself into this temporary

ephemeral

prison’s walls

Translated by Jonas Zdanys

Nijolė Miliauskaitė “Silk”

Lithuanian Post-samizdat – Set of Poetry Chapbooks “Frankfurt Chapbooks”