Навіщо. What For

***

When respite comes

Soldiers go to schools,

They enter classes, they move desks together

They lay their sleeping bags next to blackboard,

They put machine-guns on teachers' desks.

They're happy to see the physics textbook for Grade 8

As if they have seen a long-standing friend.

And then they wrinkle their foreheads

As problems there are too difficult.

And where is a good student who's going to prompt?

She is in a cellar not far from here,

Without lights or food or telephone.

Or else she's frantically collecting money

For a plastic prosthetic arm

For the guy who teased and beat her at school;

And now he fought at the battlefield.

But maybe she just sits in a kitchen

And dials the number, time after time,

Of the customer who's already in heaven

But they do not tell about it yet.

As our powers-that-be used to study Maths

So that it deserved a bad mark.

So who's on duty? And who is absent?

Is there a reasonable ground

For the vacant seat next to you?

This is the kind of universities they have now.

This is the school of life and death.

Such an idea of fragility of happiness

That you won't find it in the textbook.

And the one who comes back is not the best student,

It's just that he'll stay different from all the others

Because he saw so much in life

That you can't even scratch it on the desk's surface...

13 August 2014