No, Not this One! (after Anna Akhmatova)

Why do shadows insist
on swimming through rough waves of memory,
divers scattering black corals on the bottom
of my heart paved with stained glass.

In the precipice of wake, hooked fingers drag me behind
Hamlet and Laertes, chests to poisoned-tipped swords,
while MacBeth bathes the Earth in his blood sea.
All human kindness hardens to stone, revenge calls
paint arid cracking in crooked houses, on lands
shattered by trumpet-blasts of pain,
death grinds skin to white dust, ghosts
mirror in dilated pupils of eyelashless eyes

I tread torn calendars of mournings.
Sleepwalker jumps from balcony, hand in hand
with stillborn child. I wrap them in the black shawl
I wove before green candle drank last drop of air
from asphyxial lungs. Ite, Missa est .
Incense chokes tombstone angels with stone smiles
that lambaste life in letters carved in marble or muddy ground,
doors close on bones sinking in the entrails of the Earth.

Too many deaths !
Not this one! Not my spirit's!
My chalk-painted face will defy you,
yellow-toothed skull, hunter of believers.
I'll live this last time. I'll spread tulips, orange,
purple carpeted paths for miles in brilliance,
will hang bells on birches and weeping willows
to break the ice silence you hook our jaws with.

My spirit will be steel against your bloody blade.
On top of granite rock, I'll shout with the surf
that splashes boiling foam on life.

Commentary:

The poem, though it may sound gloomy at a first read, is the awareness of a reality of evil and death as well as a rebellion, a shout not to accept it passively, but react and reaffirm life. It's not death that is scaring to me, it's what causes it in the world, and its blind harvesting in a personal context. It was a further death among beloved that inspired the first lines, but then Shakespeare and his great tragedies offered me images that embed all the evil existing in the world, the horrors caused by human weaknesses, death as the texture of life. It is human and easy to crash against death, violence, pain, impotence, but the poet has a way to react, to denounce, to shout, to rebel: writing! With the hope someone will read/listen.