Seven Signs of the Lion

FLIGHT 4772 TO WARSAW

FLIGHT 4772 TO WARSAW

The first leg of the flight to Warsaw was mostly uneventful except for one chance meeting. Though curiously Nicholas met a rather attractive woman by the name of Lilia from Poland on the flight. Her long pitch-black and naturally curly hair flowed down her shoulders and back. Unfortunately for Nicholas, he was able to speak with her mostly only for the last two hours of the flight. By nature Nicholas was shy, and it took him a while to start up a conversation with her, and she was extremely tired and slept for several hours before awakening from a deep sleep that seemed filled with dreams.

“Do you speak English?” He mentioned to her after she groggily woke up as the plane according to the flight-position tracker screen was flying over England.

“Sure,” she laughed with a nice sparkle in her warm brown eyes. “I did my Ph.D. at Harvard. I’ve lived in the States for five years.”

“Oh… I did my Ph.D. at Stony Brook in English. I wrote on Milton and Blake. You know, the heaven and hell stuff. Paradise lost and paradise gained. What did you write on?”

“Antonych.”

“Is he Polish?”

“Kind of,” she laughed. “He’s Lemko, but he wrote in Ukrainian. He was a poet who died in 1937,” she said in her mildly accented English. “Bohdan Ihor Antonych is his full name.”

“So what are you doing in Poland?”

“That’s where I live. I teach Ukrainian at Jagiellion University in Krakow. But I’ve traveled a lot to Lviv. That’s where Antonych went to school and did most of his writing. He died of pneumonia there in a hospital in 37.”

“Wow!” He said. “That’s quite a coincidence. I’m going over to Lviv on a Fulbright. I’ve been learning Ukrainian and getting back into my family roots. You might think it’s a bit strange, but I had a dream about seven signs of the lion that I need to find in Lviv. It intrigued me.”

“You know, Antonych has a poem called “The Sign of the Lion…,” she said, and paused thoughtfully. “I have a copy of it in this book,” and she pulled out a volume from her travel bag and flipped through it until she found the poem. “It’s from his 1936 collection Book of the Lion.”

“Can you help me translate it into English?”

Here is the translation that emerged from their collaboration:

THE SIGN OF THE LION

A kingdom of dead flowers – the desert sleeps

in a golden red shirt of sand.

The stripling sedge is the devilry of foliage,

the chasing of the sun’s ecstasy and lightning.

Living candles above the coffin of the earth,

stiff weeds suddenly like a burning bush.

Like bushes bent over by a hand,

the bottomless abysses of faith bend aside.

And you see eternity – an opal sky

and the fluttering of the red streams of flame.

From behind mountains of centuries the Constellation

of the Lion leads, this is the sign

of monarchs, of warriors, of prophets.

The sun darkens in a cloud of gray birds,

the laurels of a storm crown it, brown, blue,

and thunder, like the golden signature in a book,

will endure on the pages of the desert.

The signature of thunder in the royal book of lions

written by the winds from below the Sinai,

from the slopes of the mountain that embellish the brocade

spire of sands with the garland of God’s lightning.

Sinai wind, strike the open playing cards!

Without you I am an empty vessel of form.

On guard all the day over a prophetic spring,

and the night is like a bible red and black.

Nicholas thanked Lilia as they disembarked from the plane and took down her phone number and exchanged email addresses with her. Was the poem the first sign of the lion he was supposed to find? He was tired at that point since he couldn’t sleep on the plane, so he’d have to mull it over another time.