WINTER SOLSTICE

1. FIRST SUN: SAGITTARIUS

What an abruptly short day, mother!

The solar circle overturns
like a knot of infinity
not from love, merely from duty
and without the incredulity of a woman
for whom nothing is certain
nothing hers nor foreign
to the ecliptic of existence.

The day grows and descends
in a perfect rhythm
that makes repairs of death
and leaves us confused and ignorant
that time is a pantomime.

The solstice is an initiation
into unearthly customs
into the pagan cults
of fire and water
of libido and adventure.

When it apparently stops,
the sun surrenders
its everyday chores, the mundane.
The deep sleep of the bear. Scepticism.
This is before it unfolds the ritual of the equinox
and chance. Splendour. Voluptuousness.

I do not complain;
I only shut my eyes
and turn from the double lives
to remove my untimely imprint
from the night of parallel loves
the unrequited
the unprecedented ones.



2. SECOND SUN: JUPITER/PERUN
- supreme -

Too much pleasure and torment one after the other:
I refuse to testify to such passion
I refuse to admit it is finished.
With the idealism of a half-man
and the handicap of a centaur
I stretch the Arrow
like the sky
like the heart.

What I offer is not from humility,
but from self-love
and it is a familiar scene
where maybe not only I
will recognize myself.

A song in my mother tongue spills from my mouth
its obsessive longing takes wing
shaped like a man almost alive
yet I stay determined
at the same place
as if I were returning.

And God, I do return!

At the three-way crossing of the sun appear
a man, a lion and a foiled god.
Whirlpool. Whirlwind. Whirligig.
Water, abyss, sole, nonetheless.
The iconography of the trigram is resistant
to seasonal regulations and idols.
Between sun and woman there are no mediators
when they are born.

How many more ordeals before I escape
the fiery shirt in which I
was first illuminated?
Where does this lust come from?
Does it refract me multicoloured
like a trout in the male mirrors?

Who can recognize this double urge
this twinned sun
that burns in the sky
and remain human?


3. THIRD SUN: LEO
- rising sun -

To whom are you handing over the locks, father?
To whom the symbols?
Beware:

Evil is the fate of the supreme
and sunrise belongs to the night.
The stranger will take advantage
of the sky's generosity
to enter through underground gates
sprinkling us with poison
Scorpius-Ophiucus^* .
Prolonged death.

Offer a sacrifice
an antidote
give us a live word.
Consecrate the throne of freedom
take heed of Venus' urge.
May sin give us warmth.
Replicate the gap
between the index finger and the thumb
that world-of-its-own
that invisible might
love-for-love's-sake
nothing more.

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* Astrologically Ophiucus is the Snakebearer or the 13th sign of the Zodiac. It is variable, so it coincides with the period of Sagittarius, and also with Scorpio or Capricorn.

Translated by Ilija Casule and Thomas Shapcott

© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
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