Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/254

 

In heat and in cold, ’mid snow and 'mid rainfall.
I have played behind hedges and played beneath windows;
Only a single string has my fiddle,
The heavy sigh of the seventy thousand,
That have perished 'neath Lysá, hard by Bohumín;
They have perished amid their wrenched-away pinewoods,
In the wrenched-away Bezkyds slowly they perish,
They in Šumbark have perished, in Lutyň have perished,
In Datyne perish, in Dětmarovice,
They in Poremba perished, they in Dombrová perish.
A stirring has come o'er the seventy thousand;
Long ago on the Olza was pitched an encampment,
Far have we yielded beyond the Lucyna,
Crossing to Morava, beyond the Ostravice,
A nation of silence, a stock that is gone.

As David in front of the ark, so before them
Like a mad snake to the sound of the reed-pipe,
Doth dance the quaint bard of the seventy thousand,
The Bezkyd Don Quixote, with juniper spear-shaft,
Armour of moss and a helmet of pine-cones,