The Earth - Kadyr Myrza Ali

Now I’ve found my yurt a place on the globe,
the earth’s ordeals are likewise mine.
This means I’ve broken up with sleep
and forgotten how nightingales hail the dawn.
When moonlight turns the snow to silver,
who wants blood on the earth?
Here’s Genghis,
together with Batu, Hitler, Attila
skewing their fatal way through the centuries.
More than once they slit the earth’s veins,
and more than once stuffed its head in a noose.
But someone whose planet of birth was the same
helped them to walk and worked as their nurse.
Who can enumerate the innumerable tortures,
the civilizations now just ashes?
All of these now
are the earth’s open sores.
And their names are Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.
Earth that I love, you’ll need to forgive us
our dreadful fate. You look so defenceless.
If only I could have you sit
on my lap,
I’d stroke your head and be gentle.

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Kadyr Myrza Ali (1935 - 2011) Kazakhstan
Translated by Jason Harding
Source: Contemporary Kazakh Literature: Poetry Anthology, edited by Jason Harding, Public Foundation National Bureau of Translations and Cambridge University Press, 2019
©Ұлттық Аударма Бюросы (National Bureau of Translations) 2019