It is common knowledge in village Woop-Woop:  
Gnyaneshwar penned "Gnyaneshwari" in one fell swoop,
but later on, after drinking some coconut juice,
he jetted off into mahasamadhi* —whooz!

As a tractor operator from the very place  
equated mahasamadhi to returning—with grace—
one's worn-out ticket to Heavenly Lord,
his face was gilded by last twilight rays.

Mid-supper, the milkmaids from the very hickst  
included "Gnyaneshwari" into Brodsky's List,  
though Brodsky didn't stop his resting in peace,
for he'd grown tired of exhorting lay-deez,

provided that their choice wasn't that bad.
Gnyaneshwar had penned "Gnyaneshwari,"—poor lad!
He had a hard time bringing it home to folks
who had a penchant for not connecting the dots.      

About the said Gnyaneshwar—if only he knew
that in less than a millennium, a random dude
would quote "Gnyaneshwari" in one fell sway—
otherwise, he'd have surely whispered: "I stay."

*mahasamadhi can be viewed as a non-violent suicide

Swish, swish. Street-sweepers go in lock-
step, though each has their own biological clock;
each uniquely wields their pulsating brooms, though
someone would claim all are woken by roosters.

Street-sweepers will teach you how to smash
the truth that cleanliness is the absence of trash.
They'll prove it with their own swishing and capture,
including the truth's shards geometrizing the texture

of the insides of their bottomless garbage bags.
There underneath, as abysmally as it gets, 
you'll find even more of those shards, that's without
all sorts of filth
flattened out. 

You'll never see street-sweepers hurry or fuss;
they carry themselves with such dignity and class,
while you tighten the fat of your desk-jokey belly,
when your grumpy superior
wants to turn you to jelly.

Mom wants her child to make it through school,
then jump to college — all to grow the pool
of lawyers, managers, marketers, psycholo-
gists, that is, experts in the eternal soul. Oh,
 
she has no issue with this dream at all,
so long as her child will stand fair and tall;
she would never want to see them street-sweeping,
including the shards of her dreams and tears of her weeping.

Yet, life arranges roles, issuing a decree,
who will tighten their fat, and who is to steer
the truth with their very hands, sweeping in style,
and be celebrated in verse
or maybe
in prose.

~ Vladimir Burich

Where to keep the treasure?

Over the bed,
in full view of a casual partner?
Under the tomb
desecrated with **** swastikas?
Inside the book
that will be found and opened,
with his pure hands,
by a masturbator?
In the soul,
right beside wounds?

Where,
where to keep the treasure?

You just grip it
and walk
without opening the fist.

You'd think he came to the shore to watch a ginger-haired dog,
sprawled like a wrung-out towel left by a beachgoer in haste,
staring into horizon blurred by thickening fog,
hearing repetitive lament of rocks being ground by waves?

No. His reason for coming was as blatant as that
of a tough who says he picks fights, because he just likes to fight.
That the doggy was gingering the monochrome of the sand  
is far from being the point. Simply put, never mind.    

The point is this: he just needed a cubic meter of air
to sniff in many a molecule from the arbitrary cube.
Chiefly, he craved those of oxygen, and, just to be fair,
the dog was oxygenating its blood circuitry, too.

But that was just the beginning—he wondered what would come next,
when his aerial chalice drained itself to the lees:
he'd heard of the airless void as a bottomless nest
of other provisional "particles", quote, unquote, and as is.

Yet, if only those quanta could trickle down his throat,
the ladles still poured out some extra, like a hearty gravity's soup.
And after, they lavishly offered some time and space for dessert.
Was that the end of all? Bite it! It was an infinite loop.

I can't really say where exactly all that infinity ceased,
but, all of a sudden, an impulse emerged in him, picking its way—
through all his quarks—to pet the ginger-coated beast,
which sensed it through all its quanta, its tail thumping the gray

sand of the beach.

This Earth is home
to eight billion visionaries.
Their revelations begin
with a baby's first cry,
and then their missions unfold,
each
their own messiah.

At times, prophecies concur,
forming fleeting alliances:
where no one sows salt,
mushroom colonies strike—
each member with its stem,
a cocked tricorn hat,
and live performances.
"Now my turn—gimme the mike!"

Every oracle's merit
is gauged by impartial Something
beyond face,
beyond sounding.

To my left, old women huddle
by the roadside, thinning lives.
They're upholding one another,
so all will check with lightsome spines

at the cemetery's receiving desk,
then melt away in turquoise bliss.
I wish to think what waits is rest,
not stewing in beetroot abyss.

To my right, kids comet by,
and through them—life's current raw.
I wish to think the Tree of Life
will graft each in its midmost core.

How I wish
the innocent
were never wronged...

In a restaurant
he was studying the menu:

~ Raw emotion with blood
~ Medium-rare emotion
~ Stir-fried emotion
~ Deep-fried emotion

Emotions, refined with thought,
had to be preordered
years in advance

in a separate annex.

...For attention is a kind of field of rambling mathematical dots;
they ramble all over the body, emotions, feelings, and thoughts;
the dots, having rambled away, come back with a certain catch;
attention is a coveted prize for various centers of force;
robust frontal lobes are required for good attention control;
too rarified an attention will make you a gullible fool,
and overmuch concentration will make you an idiot, too;
the line between folly and idiocy isn't so clear-cut;
Divine assembles the dots into a congruous kaleidoscope;
Divine alone sends them flying into a congruous kaleidoscope;
one humbly offers attention to Him for this very end;
this yields more beatification than slaughtering a buffalo herd;
the sacrifice of attention is better than donating to church;
attention, may have to do with skittish bosons of Higgs;
controlling and refining attention is a primary duty of man;
relaxing attention in Her is by far the greatest of joys.
And now, you can attend to your half-eaten Buffalo wings.

~ Daniil Andreev

The predawn breeze caresses eternally sacred stones.
The muezzin raises his hands, ready to chant the adhan
over somber Galilee, where time quietly flows
through Cana's and Bethlehem's ashes. He calls: "Allah-il-Allah".

Like a rose mirage, Damascus groves and temples
will shimmer. Chador-clad women bead gems, never in rush.
The breeze blows now and then, and waves gently bring their favors;
the summoning trumpets of Angel, Lion, and Eagle are hushed.

Yet, fishing nets remain wistful, just as when the Lamb was slain;
the Crusaders' coffins slumber, steeped in cedar and myrrh.
And crowds of motley supplicants time and time again
will scurry to His Sepulcher from different ends of the earth.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Stars hadn't gone dark yet.
Stars were where they belonged in,
when roosters were waking up and
shouting throaty songs in
the hennery, perched ceremoniously.
...The silence died out,
just like cathedral's quiet
does with the first choral sound,
echoing gloriously.

Having abandoned warm blankets,
grouchy and half-sleeping,
plowmen harnessed their cattle.
It was in the beginning.
The day broke as though a new egg,
revealing the orange yolk, meaning
the sun was rising; a duet
of skylarks
must have been singing.

Roosters usually fancied
grains of pearls over millet,
with their roostery senses
they searched for them here and there  
dunking into the dung. Yet,
grains were there to reclaim,
grains were there to extract, and,
at sunrise, they would proclaim:    
"We've found them all by ourselves
and husked them with a great artfulness.
So we’re boasting to everyone else          
about this fortune of ours."

In this throaty chime,
performed for eons,
repeatedly,
I see the fabric of time,
discovered by roosters unwittingly.