Wiser For Your Death Poem by Pavol Janik

(for Miroslav Valek)
Roots grow into the earth like coffins,
Opera singers
sound-painterly gargle on the stage,
a storm drives waves to the shores of a puddle.
All at the first moment
of the forgetting of the discovery of America.
At the bottom of their souls
everybody repairs their own Titanic.
The night sky spills itself on the ground
like sparkling snow.
And the dead remain with us
dumb as reproaches.

(1998)