Vivos plango - Putinas

Now I depart. With benedictory grace

A world of silence summons me to go,

I feel the gentle shroud of endless space,

The Night that soothes and softens all our woe.

A boundless liberty, a perfect rest

Opens to greet the long-awaited guest.

   The dusk of twilight falls. I go 

   To join my folk, to join my kin. 

    Yet still I see the west aglow 

   And hear in distant towers a din 

   That calls me back. Sorrow and pain 

   Suffuse my breast with gall and spite. 

   Dusk falls but daylight's grieves remain. 

   In angry heat my heart has bled; 

   It has not learnt to worship might. 

   I call the dead.

I summon every skeleton that lies

In grave-yard hill or valley, sand or clay,

Corpses in ditches, pits beside the way,

And some in dug and tended graves; arise!

Come, legions of the venerable ground,

All you who fell beneath a torturer's blow,

You who in winter's starving desert found

Death's solace in the symphony of snow;

The countless men who chose to fight and stand

For the freedom of our land.

   The executioners tore your limbs, 

   They gloried in your groans and sighs; 

   Your agony pleased their drunken whims. 

   While torches glistened bright and red, 

   They tramped your graves with dancing tread. 

   Disfigured and disgraced, arise!

---

Vincas Mykolaitis [Putinas] (1893 - 1967) Lithuania

Translated by Raphael Sealey

Source: Lituanus, Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences, Volume 15, No. 1 - Spring 1969

• Note: This is the first part of a a two-part poem called Vivos plango, mortuos voco (I lament the living, I call the dead) - the second part (Mortuos voco) Is on this blog here.