Parade of Players

A parade of actors passes, waltzing at the Pokrovsky Gate,
their masks laugh as loudly as if no one would ever die.
And each of them is someone who lacked fire,
and each one carries fragments of someone else’s “me” in their palms.

And the light of the lanterns blurs like a belated answer,
and someone reads from a prompter, the words of which are not there.
And the music hangs subtly on the rusty hinges of silence,
as if it was composed for the first and main guilt!

You look through them and see no faces, no names, no borders,
as if this whole performance was needed to make us fall on our faces.
And the wind leafs through the posters, where time has forgotten the words,
and the city seems to remember, but pretends that this is just rumor.

And we remain on the edge, where someone's route ends,
where every wrong step sounds like a farewell salute.
And if you say that it's just a game until the morning -
I'll just nod because I don't believe in the stroke of a pen.

And somewhere behind this procession, in the folds of their silken phrases,
the silence that once prayed for us lives on.