Saturdays / Mood / Drowned stars | Petya Dubarova, 1962-79

 Petya Dubarova

Saturdays

On Saturdays I’m unappreciated –
wild, flexible, and lively as a lynx.
And tiredness, having turned into a whim,
vacates me like a wound – healed up and faded.

School totally collapses in my mind
and I am far from registers an blackboards.
A hundred thousand rivers run towards me,
tints, hues, and rainbows fill my eyes,

and I get rhythms from those gipsy women.
I’m very, very strong – a vine in spring,
and I turn my guitar into a tear;
I never ask questions, never listen.

On Saturdays I’m unappreciated –
wild, flexible, and lively as a lynx.
And fear, sorrow, tiredness or whims
vacate me like a wound – healed up and faded.

And I’m not even sure who I am.
But when I put on Monday’s uniform –
that blackboard-tunic once again,
I turn into a good girl as before.

Mood

The whole sky stumbled on a cloud,
And tumbled like a temple dome.
Then like a plane, it shrieked, it shouted.
And I saw, angered again and dumb,

The night rain, lean to kick
The clipped off border of the cloud.
Joy, branching out in me, was an oak
And vast the width of its crown…

For my life is a playful minute,
Snatched by a long day – instantly,
I live quite unnoticed in it
But now all the sky lives in me.

Drowned stars

Drowned stars are floating on the sea.
Salt burnt the freshness of their colour.
How softly, without taking leave,
they lost both light and power.

But I would turn my heart right now
into a pyramid, a sell,
and it would bring them back alive,
ripe in its flesh, like a shell.

Petya Dubarova
tr. D. D. Wilson / The Sea and Me, 1980