On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

About A Comet

 

 

A boy timidly waves and the train departs.

I think about today, what makes it different?

Maybe that I read about a comet.

 

Sometimes a comet doesn’t return.

 

A backpack carries off a schoolgirl like a colorful bird of prey.

Two abandoned bags with ears perked in the station hall.

Behind foggy windows girls send each other smoke signals.

 

You can see the brewery from here,

a boat mooring at the dock.

People from the desert carry shyness into the hall.

 

You almost can’t see them through the station

window: Two pagan goddesses —

one coughing fire into the face of the other.

 

 

◆     ◆     ◆     ◆     ◆

 

 

Cretan Night

 

I.

I read with my finger on paper and the finger devours the text

Suddenly it’s here: mountains sail and ships loom

The sail tightens the wind and drives the sea beneath it

 

A city blazes above a valley and illuminates a mountain of unrest

approaching like a giant ferry

 

Moon like a sickle and black grass

rising beneath its blade

 

All things in the world are shadow, depth, and light

 

 

II.

Light wanders from the Venetian fortress

I look back and the sea shifts the whole coast

 

A match plows wrinkles into the face

And the hand burns

 

The wind tears a cough and a dark plant

disseminates a few sparks of ash

Who is it?

 

No one remembers us

behind the light of the fortress

 

 

III.

We stood on the cape

and watched the coastal fires

 

Laughter carried in from the distance, words twinkled

and lit up a mouth and part of a face

 

We said goodbye and walked into the dark

Only talons and feathers remained of the sun

 

What remained of us supported us in darkness

Women’s cries fell from the cliff into the lake

 

 

IV.

In Palaiochora they will bring a pitcher full of light

and we can stay

 

The wind takes a wave in its mouth and spits it on Amazonia

Siberia burns and writhes like a foreign face, far away Australia burns

 

I’ll reach out for water like a root wandering in a tomb

All of the wind will shine in my blood

 

The thin shirt stretches like a Greenlandic flag

into which someone coughed up something alive

 

I’ve forgotten everything but the wind

 

 

◆     ◆     ◆     ◆     ◆

 

 

Among Debris

 

Every secluded corner will one day be a square in the metropolis.

All life will be discovered and all death clarified.

Hills and forests will be disassembled in the dark of night

and placed into boxes and reassembled just before dawn

and arranged along the highways.

The calm before the storm will become the storm before the endless calm,

from which you will poke things through a slot to the other side

there, where you lived.

 

 

◆     ◆     ◆     ◆     ◆

 

 

At Nechrance

 

My father and I take turns at the oar on the borrowed rowboat

and lowering the bait in the flooded sandpit

 

We drag a rain cloud behind us

and when the storm breaks, we’re not ready

 

The wind pushes the boat from the shore against human power

my son dumps the fish and uses the bucket

to empty the boat of water

 

We’re rowing

 

I don’t know why I’m now thinking of a book

my place marked with a small white handkerchief

 

Is someone giving me the answer to a question

I haven’t asked?

 

We’re rowing, but we can’t anymore

 

Behind that cloud

the sun is bright as a word, I know that

 

but the one who thinks of every move for me

I don’t know

 

/     /     /     /     /

 

The four poems above by Milan Děžinský are included in Gravitation, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on March 3, 2026, and appear here with the permission of the press. To pre-order/order a copy from Bookshop.org, click here.