Valeryia Simanenkava is participating in the International Literary Creation Competition, 7th Edition, from Minsk, Belarus and is 20 years old. We thank her for her participation and wish her success.

The Chest

Once you’ll wake up in the morning and thick layers of dust will cover
Footnotes written by hand, with a brown coffee stain on them.
They’ve been lying on chest near your bed and changing their colour.

You’ll find there a metal, a bit rusty clip you used to hold
Precious memories in the messy notebook with yellowish pages
Full of ink reminders, glances, teardrops and faces.

You’ll stay for two hundred seconds in front of this guard of past,
As if you could remember all years starring at wooden drawers 
And keeping breath until your heart stops.

Turn on the lamp you don’t touch while dusting on Sundays.
Move it carefully to find a thin grey thread that used to tight
The button close to linen shirt you hugged once.

Maybe you’ll come across with a dried maple leaf
Or glimmering, slightly faded partridge’s feather.
How old are they? How long would they prohibit your eyes to see further?

Open the third drawer before reminiscent sounds sorely vanish
Freeing your ears for bipping cars and always late puffing buses.
Find a box of “forget-me-nots” that never meant to be flowers

A small chest in a bigger one, where you save your sentimental values.
It is not nostalgia that you feel, fingering letters and cinema tickets -
It’s hardness of life that moves but you can’t stop it.

In the end it’s better to put away footnotes, clips, leaves and regrets in it,
Till the moment you find new buttons, threads, songs and feelings,
So, you can wake up again in room of endless, pervasive meanings.


Symphony

Green bushy crowns of trees along the road
Are swaying gently on the northern wind,
Soft grass is echoing the whisper song —
The melody of nature symphony.

I hear the clouds prepared for rain
That start to liberate in rolls of thunder.
They intertwine the sky and foam the air
Completing harmony with voice of wonder.

The melancholic altos of the endless soil
Accompanied by cracking brittle twigs
Are merging with sopranos of the roaring flows
That breathe in hidden forest streams.

I hear how birds are trilling near me,
Though they are soaring in the heights.
Their graceful choir reaches every ear
And meets in the horizon with all other sounds.

The orchestra of those who grow and live
Is resonating in my human soul,
As if it’s not just rain and northern wind
But God who speaks, who sings, who laughs and mourns.
 

What is happening after everything falls asleep

What is happening after everything falls asleep, 
When the implacable silence becomes infinite? 
When the cycles of mornings and nights complete, 
Will the frightening darkness turn into imminent?             
Where is everything going when the light disappears? 
Is there a path to place where all passed stands? 
Will there be space for love, will it be saved from fears,
When we appear in it, yearning for someone’s hands?
What is waiting for millions of our entities? 
Will they become the stars or rest in the solid ground? 
What will they find in abyss: calmness or agonies?
Will they feel lost, or free, or drowned? 
Will anyone stand near us or will we stay there forlorn?
Will any of these denouements happen to us at all?