Looking Upwards
These stones overhead,
comets juggling omens…
What’s the distance between nothing
and no other thing?
We eye the sky thinking of a science
to replace it with. Has anybody flown
to holiness from a language?
To bliss from publicity?
You’re right, we should have counted
air balloons inside our heads
well beforehand. Do you know
that all our breezes are sung by vultures?
The sky creates cities and dominions.
Under the setting celestial persimmon, somebody
swaps the whole planetarium of glowworms
for a yarn receptacle.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His most recent poetry collections are The Two-Headed Man and The Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and Scultura Involontaria (Casa della poesia, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition). His new collection entitled Sky Sailing is due from Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in 2022. His latest novel is The Flying Dutchman, has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications, England, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled Accursed Poets (Smokestack Books, 2020). He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.