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LITUANUS
LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Volume 51, No.1 - Spring 2005
Editor of this issue: Stasys Goštautas ISSN 0024-5089 Copyright © 2005 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc. |
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TO THE WEST
In Memory of My Father
JONAS LANDSBERGIS
From the inception
he looked to the light
and while young,
tranquil moonlight drew him into a trance,
sleepwalking poet
sweet-eyed youth.
Then from tyrannies' darkness he fled,
to abide in 'Wiesbaden,
in twilight,
but finally on to the west he sailed,
where sun and moon,
reflected shapes of an ebbing war,
inflected thoughts of the coming shore.
Brooklyn, polluted gray light
cowered on brownstones,
and where was home?
From the light of knowledge,
of books, of words
in the well-lit Brooklyn Public Library,
Grand Army Plaza,
He at last dispelled,
All the shadows
To find his wife, his star.
Though the Dodgers ran away to the west,
He stayed with his Mets,
And his sons and students grew
In the sun, in his light.
He beheld and rejoiced that in Maine,
at the Monastery,
the light that fell,
was drawn into trees whose roots,
through prayers and poems, somehow found,
Lithuania, its soil, its soul,
And his voice was transmitted back to the spirits
Of the loving flowers, elves, and trees
Ruta
Feja
Eglė - Demanding Freedom.
We talked of Čiurlionis's corpuscular rays,
Whose light spread through layers of myth,
land, thought and time,
we talked of the endless connections of the world,
his slowly graying hair.
What a lucid but desolate light that day in the
Cemetery when his mother died,
and then his father too,
was not the sun eclipsed that day,
the sun sank lower in the west.
And now he has fled,
This time from the tyranny of age,
to the setting sun,
to the west,
To the blessed isles,
his eyes now open to the light of his ever present angels,
now he looks to the east,
To the rising sun,
and he sings a joyful aubade,
to console and echo our sad serenade.
April 8, 2004