и членам важных для меня сообществ: Миллбурнского клуба, Beth Hatikvah synagogue, the Aikido Centers of New Jersey, Madison Studio Yoga, the Arts by the People program.
Я признательна Брюсу Эсригу, который помог мне отредактировать англоязычные тексты, проявив при этом свойственные ему вдумчивость, остроумие, любовь к слову (а также пристрастие к точке с запятой).
Искренне благодарю Рашель Миневич, Эда Побужанского и Александра (Сашу) Казакова за полезные советы и ценные замечания.
Я рада, что Анастасия Шеперд стала моим партнёром в литературной игре, которую мы назвали «Странники в странном мире». Часть этой игры вошла в цикл The Age of discovery.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing the English language texts. He brought to this task his penchant for deep thought, his playful sense of humor and his love of words and of semicolons.
I want to thank Rashel Minevich, Ed Pobuzhansky and Aleksandr (Sasha) Kazakov for insightful comments and valuable suggestions.
I am glad that Anastasya Shepherd is my co-creator of the literary game we called “Travelers in a strange world”. This game is great fun to play, and it inspired “The Age of discovery”.
What I used to think of
As myself
Turned out to be
A chrysalis.
Now it has split open.
An old woman is slowly emerging.
She will wait patiently
For her crumpled rags to unfurl,
For the sun to harden them
Into wings.
My little daughter wakes in tears:
She fancies that her bed is drawn
into a dimness which appears
to be the deep of all her fears
but which, in point of fact, is dawn.
Not life or death,
Creation or its fall,
Not good or evil,
But the whole, the all —
This fruit of knowledge
Is still dim, still green.
The ripening of dawn
Remains unseen.
The soul does not yet trust
The sense of sight,
Still hides in terror
From the kindling light.
It’s here, though each glimpse of it is brief,
It’s here, the lambent glow of joy and grief.
Am I reflections of the world or the mirrors reflecting it?
One story of this world
Begins with “Let there be light”.
I do not think that punctuation
Had been invented
When these words were first recorded.
But judging from what follows,
An exclamation mark
Should cap that sentence.
But what about Indra’s net?
What are the words
That first emitted and still carry
The light that knits it into one great whole?
What punctuation should we use?
A question mark seems most fitting.
You and I, like everybody else,
Are both:
Jewels linked into a net
And reflections bouncing within a hall of mirrors.
But let us not get trapped.
We have the power to play it
Like a game, a dance,
A laugh-inducing tickle.
Я список кораблей прочёл до середины
…The list Of soaring ships I’ve read up to the middle.
Wake up! Wake up!
There is a porthole, a port, a portal,
A momentary gap
Right here,
Where the past
Meets with the future.
A dawn breeze is rising.
You can glimpse the swaying masts,
The white sails being hoisted.
You can hear the seagulls laughing,
The lines groaning, singing,
Taut with force
Ready to propel the ship.
Let us arise and cross the threshold,
Let us run
To where the land and the water
Meet.
It is for us to name the vessel,
To unfurl the flag,
To set course
Across an uncharted sea.
It's a strange world,
made of echoing emptiness
pulling itself together…
