THE BABYLON SONG

It is more and more difficult to write a Letter.

The irretrievable clearness of words is lost.

Every poem used to be full of

uncanny meaning:

on the one side there were the woman and night,

and on the other light and I.

Now it is different:

Penelope’s weave of my civilisation

is undone over night, it ebbs easily.

If all words have been spoken,

everything, it then seems, has already happened.

And that would be terrible:

as if the World were a great Theatre

in which for a long time there has been not

a single writer, or director, or musician.

The whole of space, the Stage, the Planet

Is inhabited by actors

(gone wild without all the Others,

without the Manuscript of the creator)

an entire ocean of actors

infinitely repeating

scraps of the same roles.

There is simply no one to tell them

What to say, or where to go.

If all the words have already been in His wrath, then we have forever been – tired.

Still, the limits of the unutterable are wider and wider. And it is more and more difficult to eat the darkness of the last Nothing and spew the light that changes everything into Being, into the certainty of Language.

Oh, sweet demons of erudition! When God spilled the languages over Babylon perhaps he only gave us sturdier material: after all, one does not get to the Creator’s throne by piling bricks.

Translated by Ulvija Tanović

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