Belarus Trilogy

June-July, Belarus-Barcelona-Koln















I

In Moscow club

Dave said every girl is named either Olga or Tonia

They could dance gracefully

Or as wild as you could imagine

But they usually could not

Afford the expensive drinks in the bar

White city, white church and white square

White women in the white skirts strolling along the white streets

Belarus loves white and its majesty 

As if white covers the old wounds

Or haunting ghosts from the concentration camps

Or rigidity, shame, confusion, misery and solitude

It is all done under the name of the history’s glory

And culture heritage, tradition, national identity

How many times can a city be born, a nation be born

Belarus does not know the exuberance of the birth

Let alone the pain of the pregnancy

It simply wraps itself with a piece of white sheet

Managing to stay away from the dead and the mad

Quiet, self-assured, but afraid of malnutrition and intrusion

    

II

On the phone

She told me her name is Tonia

High cheek, blond, twenty year old

She asked whether I was American

I said, yes

I lied to please her 

You lower your noble head and bend over your graceful shoulder

Just to show how arrogant you are

Belarus, the superior among the inferiors

You cannot fool me as you have fooled the others

Not by putting on the sexy dress in the colorful neon light

Not to a Chinaman whose own homeland is suffering the same illness

Although your symptom is anemia, mine is yellow peril

History mocked us and left us in the thin air

But I cannot speak for you, neither can I speak for myself

Not as the tormented poet with all the hearts but the wealth

For the price of my soul I am buying the American mask

Sitting here, I am watching you, with my cold eyes

III

In the National museum

Where Chagall retrospective is held

Ira, a medical student and Belarusian Korean

Told me she would go to the best disco in Minsk

and danced until she dropped

If she were only given

Two hours left in her life

Who are still weeping for the land, land of legends and fairy tales

Who are still singing the songs, songs of pride and old life

Who are still reading the poems, poems from the dead poets

Who are still remembering the stories, stories of suffering and misfortune

But someone, someone will have to invoke the wasted souls from the tombs

To retrieve the betrayed passion and ideals from the abandoned monuments

To restore the damaged, the devastated, the anonymous, the forgotten

And to declare a new dignity, with the past fully reconciled