for the victims, June 4, 1989

Gone is the violence I witnessed
The fruits it engendered
Now baptized in tides of hatred
Again makes 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 death-mark

Winter has its freedom
In the naked 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