The Song

From the cycle “The Limbo Zone”

The radio in the Grey Zone finally caught a clear frequency. It was not a news bulletin, nor the voice of an announcer. It was a song, drifting from that place where the seam had finally unraveled. A woman’s voice — cracked, blue as old silk, as faded crepe de chine — floated over the ashes of Hanover, and in that voice, there was no hope, only the acknowledgment of the triumph of the void:

The day shattered into a fleeting mosaic,
Black and gray, slightly diseased,
Drowsy, dismal, and devoid of meaning,
Thus — so devoid of life…

The scabs of asphalt are eaten by decay,
Limp, withered, dead grass.
The thrombotic veins of the ancient city
Fill with a silent, persistent plague…

Death flew past with wings outstretched,
Playing a flute carved from a shinbone.
Black soot conceals the pyres,
Palaces blaze where splinters stood…

Dogs howl, conjuring fate,
The plague banner trembles over towers,
Black with blood, crimson with gloom.
The flesh is stricken with the buboes of war…

I’ll come for you, my darling,
And not only for you — for everyone.
Believe me. No matter how you shake your head…
You’ll not escape
From death…

I rush
Without restraint toward an ancient star.
I don’t bow,
But soar beside it in the blackness.
I forget
My own hated palace.
And I inhale
Only a draught of darkness and immortality.
I unfurl
The charcoal sphere of my wing.
I’m — other.
The vanity of the living is foreign to me…

The day shattered into a fleeting mosaic,
Black and gray, terminally ill.
There’ll be no more rapturous feasts —
War passed through here as the earth’s cleansing…

I’ll come…

The sound of the trombone broke into a rasp; a guitar string snapped with a dry click, like the sound of tearing fabric. And then came the silence — the real kind, which cannot be covered by a dress or a suit.

The work was finished.

← The Limbo Zone. Prologue