Eliza Segiet writes

Paradise

 

I filled my eyes with beauty and ugliness.

In the damp basement

I recall

the murmur of the river,

which,

without paying heed to the obstacles,

douched the still boulders.

For years, in the same place

the anchored stones

did not allow the elements

to move them elsewhere.

 

The relentless, mindless

figments of the earth

are to be harder than the human?

 

I will drift with the current of life

- I will find my paradise.

--tr. Artur Komoter

Eliza Segiet writes

Brink

Poor millionaires

are like water in a dry river,

broken glass,

leafless trees.

Poor,

childless millionaires

on the verge of life

adopt heirs.

They cross the brink of darkness

in the hope that

Made in Japan will survive.

Before the end they understand

that they are both

rich and beggars,

- they lived to work.

They fulfilled their desires

with the love to work.

Everything else

they postponed

- for later.

--tr. Artur Komoter

Eliza Segiet writes

It Was the Same

There will no longer be home,

smoke from the chimney.

There will be no tomorrow.

Rotten beams

cannot withstand the pressure of time.

In the crooked house

a hunched woman

– waits.

It's like it used to be,

out there behind the house flows a river.

Only now

the children do not have time to look at old age.

Time took away youth

– like the night takes away the evening.

There is no longer smoke from the chimney,

no chimney,

and there behind the house

still flows a river.

-- tr. Artur Komoter

Ruined House -- John Sell Cotman

Eliza Segiet writes

Just for a Moment

If the world stopped for a moment,

I could sit,

listen to the silence that becomes,

watch how

a river stops flowing,

how the trees congeal into motionlessness.

If the world stopped for a moment,

and I with it?

I would not see

flowering meadows,

where a river becomes just a line,

and the still trees

look like sculptures,

I would not hear the ubiquitous silence.

If the world stopped

even for one day

then people –

could not hurt people.

-- tr Artur Komoter 

Scenographia Systematis Mvndani Ptolemaici (Scenography of the Ptolemaic cosmography) --  Andreas Cellarius