Wind knocks brown leaves off the poplars
like ashes off vertical cigars,
and a trolleybus tries puddles
on the round flippers of its wheels.
A woman with an umbrella
walks across the black square
like a rustling whirligig.
One out of every three in this city is lonely.
The rain, the street, the woman, the trolleybus…
All this has already happened. Or will happen one day.
Keys on God’s keyboard are stuck,
and someone watches us from between the lines,
from the other side of the poem.
when we’ve gone, we will leave behind
not the deluge, but the melting snow of stares…
Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Pinch, Salamander, Willow Springs, Grub Street, Magma Poetry and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of “The Red Fоrest” (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.