Damask Poem by Michal Habaj

This very night bites you with the moon in your face.
Sharp glistening teeth of the towers lit up the stars above our city,
as the black sky falls heavily into the gardens.
You are singing, dear princess of laboratories,
you are singing with your face shut,
in the chambers void of a soul, desolate,
miles away from the extracted veins.
The centurian mechanism frail as a bird´s heart
has been cutting you into a deep diamond. Today cyborgs
are imitating rococo, courting you
with their hands in the universe as in a vase of flowers.
Powdered face and iron-bodied,
they lay down with you in soft beds of flesh.
You are bleeding, even more subtly than a rose kissed by a breeze,
and yet it´s not a well of blood deep inside your flower,
that makes a cyborg want to blow and fly.
There I am, under a balcony, singing out your nacreous genitalia,
weaving my lines into an invisible path of desertion.
In this boat, like in a déja-vu, we´re floating
down from Cyberia to Bratislava and the Danube
is nothing but a little thread in the Damask napery
as the night catches me by surprise near a cup of tea.

English Translation from Martin Solotruk