Ashok Niyogi
Night is night
And snow is snow
In summer,
You read the newspaper
In the park,
At night.
On Nevsky Prospekt,
The sketch artists continue to draw,
Pigsā trotters in fast food shops,
For the breakfast of the Chinese.
Cosmopolitan, is it not,
Whores from all over the USSR
Just out of Moskovsky Vagsal.
And yet Anna Akhmatova writes on,
In her soul imprisoned by Leningrad,
And an old man has newspaper
Over his face, to shade the sun.
In a park on the other side
Of Peter and Paul,
The Hermitage looks at the Neva
And horses trot
In the royal square,
With the smell of Indian food.
The Waldorf Astoria looks on
With its wafer thin sandwiches
On the piano,
The hairdresser tucked away
In the basement,
And the selected whores
In the bar, all at war.
The whiskey shop outside the Peterhoff
A whiff of Switzerland
In the middle of Scotland,
Located in the Nevaās mouth,
The skylight that rolls back
At the Grand Europa,
The stairs to fall from
In the duplex suite,
My ship at sea, what will be,
Of these afternoons in the park?
