Memorial

for the victims, June 4, 1989

Gone is the violence I witnessed

The fruits it engendered

Now baptized in tides of hatred

Again make known its prophecy

Disaster, calm and total

Joins with pain that is my own

To stand rooted beneath a pendulum

An entire corps in a cortege

Paying mourning rites to memory

Yet the past can bear no guilt

Creeping age, in spreading circles of futility

Forces youth to kneel repentantly

Youth is branded with the mark

Winter has its freedom

In the barrenness

Dreams possess illusions

As imaginings have rationality

Rearing up in acts of lone endurance

They show the weary strength of memory

A journey onward

Is fraught, as if by a curse,

With the force of a heroic end

*

Translated by Denis Mair