Sergey Dobrenkov

The free press is free
Unless it says something wrong
Then it is not free
...

Foreword

The preludes are set in a particular order, that from them a poem of its own kind might arise, possessed of its own unfolding tale. This cycle is not for the many. One must be not a poet merely, but a musician besides — or, at the least, a connoisseur possessed of a fine and discerning feeling for the classical art. Yet even this does not suffice. To feel the whole emotional fullness of each of the four-and-twenty tonalities is given to but few among professional musicians, and not even to every composer. Absolute pitch is not, here, the chief necessity — though it is not unwelcome — so much as one particular species thereof: the pitch of timbre, whereby every note is apprehended not by its height alone, but by its very colour. Yet neither is this indispensable. What matters most of all is this: that upon the sounding of even the tonic triad in a given key, one should hear within it emotional shades wholly its own — shades scarcely to be found among the like feelings called forth by that selfsame chord in any other key.
...

No star. No light. No candle burns.
The heart, once warm, is cold and still.
To rock, to lifeless stone it turns —
A tomb, shut fast, in night as chill.
...

How near doth Time now stand upon the verge!
Upon our days is fallen Judgment's shade.
One woe grows still, then doth another surge,
And close behind, a third comes undelayed.
...

autumn sun through glass —
a wasp in the honey jar
turns into amber
...

Behind the glass a painted sorrow gleams;
The eyebrow lifts on cue, the voice is torn;
Indignant tears arrive in practiced streams,
And outrage ships out fresh with every morn.
...

1. There was a father whom the Lord had blessed exceedingly, giving him, of His grace, a land goodly and wide, from the mountains even unto the sea, that his house might dwell therein together, and call upon His name.

2 And the father dealt justly with all his children, giving to every one his portion, that none should lack, and none should say, My brother hath robbed me.
...

She stood alone before the burning deep,
Where sun on sun, myriad, wheeled in flame,
And every star its dreadful watch did keep,
Too bright, too vast, too terrible to name.
...

When, rapt, the soul contemplates secret things,
A silent beam doth pierce her to the core;
Yet what she feels no other eye e'er brings
To light, though speech should labour evermore.
...

Foreword

This synopsis gathers one hundred and twenty senryu about music and the people who made it, explained it and heard it, from the first bone flute to the machine that writes songs. In keeping with the canon of the senryu, each poem has seventeen syllables, in lines of five, seven and five, and holds a single episode, idea or figure. The poems follow one another in chronological order and fall into nine parts (marked with Roman numerals) , which lead from number and breath, through chant, voices, order, form, feeling and 'breaking, ' to sound as process and, at the end, to the listening mind.
...

When first the Covid plague had laid me low,
Methought I'd been in Tartarus below;
My teeth did chatter, naught could warm me there;
I gasp'd, I choked, I fought in vain for air.
...

Upon a crag of sable, wave-worn stone
That rises sheer above the roaring deep,
A man stands bare to heav'n, and all alone,
Whilst thunder wakes what ages left to sleep.
...

I
The casement opens on the seaward hill,
Where cypress-spires stand slender, dark, and tall;
The winding paths grow dim; the air is still;
...

The sky, grown heavy, stoops too near the land;
The air is hollow; silence has its say;
A tousled carpet of fall'n leaves, wind-fann'd,
Exudes a smell of spice and tart decay.
...

To the soul that is proud, dark demons appear,
Whispering lies—that it's holy and pure,
Or they plunge it in deep despair,
Saying salvation will never be there.
...

For thousands of years since their fall from Grace,
The desperate demons learned to twist the straight,
To steal the unripe in the darks embrace—
What lacks Gods root, what bears no Graces weight.
...

You thought you owned the night,
But the night owns you.
A shadow dancing in a borrowed light,
A ghost in rewound time,
...

Blessed love can never be despair,
For the Creator knows the heart's hidden prayer—
Even words the lips refuse to bear.
...

If your voice holds no flame, just the echo of night,
A hollow refrain with no spark to ignite,
Then let the stillness rise, let the quiet remain—
For a word without fire is a breath without name...
...

The key turned in the lock—a familiar sound…
The door sighed… just as we once sighed
Over lines of old and bitter rhymes profound,
So, gift, oh gift this loneliness till dawn's light,
...