Quiet Games

by Valery Chereshnya
     translated by Izabella Mizrachi
     for Mandelstam

Overgrown child of quiet games,
Extortionist of exact words,
Living tenderly, half-asleep,
Out of just a blanket, curling up,
You made yourself such a warm shelter
That for them it became foreign —
This calm airiness —
This world created by your breath.

Maybe, I won’t argue,
In a world of rules and punishments,
Where sternness nurses grief,
Your tender gift was odd.
It’s like that. The new quite often
Makes them more cruel,
So it could even end in blood.
At the end the blood was yours.