And Churchill in a bowler,
like a movie comic,
with a cigar, like a waffle,
examines himself keenly.
We wept in anguish,
made ourselves ill weeping,
when the Luftwaffe delivered
its deadly cargo to his island.
Everything began there,
for better or worse:
the allies of the ally
—or capitulants?
At the famous table they sit,
as in a box or a puddle.
And the prisoners sit in prisons
from Archangel to Yalta.
They sit from A to Z,
their hopes pinned on Fulton
yes, on the atomic bomb,
on a third world war …
And we mustn’t weep,
at least not so it disturbs anyone,
only strike our foreheads against—what?
—an impenetrable wall.
Translated by Daniel Weissbort