Зимородок

With gratitude to my teachers:

Vyacheslav Leikin,

Stella Verbitskaya,

Professor Ellen Chances,

Craig Keller,

Master Cheng Hsiang Yu,

Sensei Greg O’Connor,

Robert Friedman,

to the communities of the Millburn Club, Beth Hatikvah synagogue, the Aikido Centers of New Jersey, Madison Studio Yoga, and the Arts by the People program.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing the English language texts. He brought to this task his penchant for deep thought, his playful sense of humor and his love of words and of semicolons.

I want to thank Rashel Minevich, Ed Pobuzhansky and Aleksandr (Sasha) Kazakov for insightful comments and valuable suggestions.

I am glad that Anastasya Shepherd is my co-creator of the literary game we called “Travelers in a strange world”. This game is great fun to play, and it inspired “The Age of discovery”.

Metamorphosis

English language poems

Metamorphosis

What I used to think of

As myself

Turned out to be

A chrysalis.

Now it has split open.

An old woman is slowly emerging.

She will wait patiently

For her crumpled rags to unfurl,

For the sun to harden them

Into wings.

Ripening

My little daughter wakes in tears:

She fancies that her bed is drawn

into a dimness which appears

to be the deep of all her fears

but which, in point of fact, is dawn.

    Vladimir Nabokov

Not life or death,

Creation or its fall,

Not good or evil,

But the whole, the all —

This fruit of knowledge

Is still dim, still green.

The ripening of dawn

Remains unseen.

The soul does not yet trust

The sense of sight,

Still hides in terror

From the kindling light.

It’s here, though each glimpse of it is brief,

It’s here, the lambent glow of joy and grief.

The Age of discovery

1. Indra’s net

Am I reflections of the world or the mirrors reflecting it?