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1. Elizabeth of Habsburg Where shall I start? I was still a child. 1 was white like marble, immaculate. My beauty they say was of the rarest kind. I was a stranger to this dreary land into which they married me, which was ravaged by plagues, where I had no loyal page, where a disease […]

* * * Such a biting white frost outside the window and inside me – I’m afraid to begin to speak for fear the hail of my words might hurt you. Pressing a harmonica to his lips, a red-headed boy in the frame on seeing me is afraid to play, for fear his song might

The Minstrels in Maxi-Coats Songs for a Viola d’Amore from Vilnius’s Užupis Region from the Eighth Decade of the 20th Century Exerpt The rusty red cliff above the Vilnelė, a broad brook which flows into the Neris in the centre of Vilnius, can be seen from afar. Would you care to go there? All you

Full Moon   A full moon shines onto a bookcase – Will the books now start going mad Like lunatics; old Hidalgo, Already a seasoned lunatic, now, I see, standing around. His helmet shines furiously.   And it thwarts my desire to sleep, Naively thinking that at least at night On the infinite road of

The Last Supper   Have you ever eaten pfloymen-tzimmes? If you never have, there’s nothing to regret, and don’t bother sampling any, it’s nothing special: potatoes, black prunes, beef: baked, dark brown, maybe due to the long baking, maybe due to the prunes, nothing out of the ordinary, just a taste of paradise, and mother used

From an Unknown Poet’s Diary     MONDAY      as if I saw smoky stains in the bedroom where my toys once lay. the sun had already eaten away the color around them. from what to build one’s castles but from a mincing machine? from what kind of dissolved sugar? those times are as

Uttered in Darkness: Conversations with Children   Loreta Lithuanian Training Centre for the Blind and Visually Impaired, 7th class   V.J.: Your life as a young girl has been very painful. What do you think about it? Loreta: I think that it’s truly beautiful. The people who are disappointed in life, maybe they haven’t really experienced it,

CHAPELB For Antanas Škėma Instead of the somber grace to live understand what a mean joy dying is DEATH’S THIS aged and faded sunset across the Lithuanian landscape sweet sunshine, back in spring, set up with the moonman first spoke a language strange to her. Death’s these deviates, the windmills lurching into the rough side

AN ILLUSION OF THE NORTHERN SKY Sometime Like a tree in November I’ll cast off all my leaves – Joy and hatred, Grief and mirage, Fear and will – And with wild naked longing, Like a baby’s first cry With which man hails the world, I will draw On the temperate northern sky Like on

Pro Memoria People had noticed the man for quite some time now. After a while almost everyone knew that he crossed the bridge over the wide river only on Sunday afternoons: at the time when worshippers spilled out of the Baroque church and into the streets. The man was not yet old. He walked straight