Стихотворения Полин Стейнер (на английском языке)

Crossing the Snow-line

I still see them –
the sculptors of Kilpeck
on the road
to Santiago de Compostela,
crossing the Roman bridge
in the small hours

westward,
always westward,
Finisterre referring
its azure,
the jubilation of wolves
spilling into the cloister.

But some
never made it back
through the wilderness
to chisel
a sleeping Christ
from the living tree

and lie fallow
under their larch ceiling
as if amazed
by the irrepressible light
at the burial of the stars.

Hieroglyph

The moon is pale
as a hare’s belly

so what trembles
the alert stillness

of this Egyptian hare
over a ripple of water

into running script?

Holy family with three hares

You might catch them
in a nocturnal landscape
on their flight into Egypt,
the moon dropping
thin flexible mirrors.

Or in a wild strawberry place,
wychelms coming
softly into leaf
through dispensation
of mist

the child lighter
than sugar-lift etching,
but still suckling
with the energy
of an icon.

Drovers

They came down holloways
between blue sloes.

I have come to know
that register of blue-darks

juniper berries deepening
through woodsmoke

the pungency of bruised herbs
at dusk

slow-burn
of driven beasts

blue intake of breath
at pasture beyond.

A Kind of Quickening

Put your ear to the quoins.
You might think
a redundant church
would be loud
with the sound of silence,
but sacred cantatas
rise to the spandrels.

Look through the squint.
St. Mary-at-the-Quay
in her field of windscreens,
where crane-drivers
glide over the hammerbeams
as if sighting eternity
seawards.

Smell the mown grass
in the roofless nave,
when children circle-dance
like Wisdom before the Lord
until the sea-fret rolls in
and they pull-up
their pearled hoods.

And the weepers on the tomb –
do they look up
in sunlight
as we repair the fabric,
salt-laden limestone,
an altar frontal
transfigured by the silkworm?

We still celebrate
the energy of otherness.
That shadow on
the lime-washed chancel
not simply Christ
as makeweight
on the flowering tree

but a jazz-singer,
dress blue as hyssop
against the downbeat dusk,
while on the skyline
wind-turbines turn
to the preaching
of the swallow.