Vladas Braziūnas

I find it strange that this time I’m not driving and that someone drives me, that the landscapes change, for the time being familiar, the skies burst into bloom that prophecies remain far away, that it’s allowed to stray into remnants, clearly greater than the whole, to come or no longer coming, a bus rolls by short of breath, slow, toward your childhood brownish-green and blotted unscrutinized places, you’ll doze off, cut across the river the swamps lull to sleep, and swings swing and throw the young upwards, to see the highest mountain and the green woods, the bristled tails of fir trees stand stiff, and oak-grove of browned copper, it rained, it flashes, it drips it’s linden not hard rock hewn by your father’s hands hard blistered, it’s not the mortifications that remain but the calluses on your palms, betraying your origin in black earth, the clay, the blue potter’s clay not blood, wagtails in the hutch under the bridge stack up their old lives, and the new one only so much as there is hope remaining to hatch a young Maybird it didn’t turn toward town, the birch grove flew past with brooms of mistletoe, but perhaps it wasn’t that, perhaps it wasn’t my hunchbacked cottage, wet sheep grazing like a November leaf frozen and unredeemable life shivers by, a fishing line from below from the black depths tugged by a pale- lipped sticky mouth, it’s already Apaščia, from the fog from an unfamiliar customs’ station scrambles a would-be apostle, unconverted, leafs through papers worthy unworthy, doesn’t raise the gate, doesn’t assign a penance of prayers, and so, won’t make my beard Margeris, Peteris, Janis and Juris, I’ll fly a bit along my brimming sea, until they press down the small cross and near my name God’s red marker