Where the death is swinging its scythe

Where the death is swinging its scythe
Quick is the poet's pen
Facing
The unavoidable end
One has to say all
One should not fritter away and crook
In this straight final lap

The mastery sharpens as a knife
Brilliance
Blood streaming along the lines
This is genuine
Obvious to everybody
The audience is overwhelmed
Binoculars are atilt

Gladiators are drawing their bloody trail
Across the arena
Fighting their destiny fighting themselves
That in their texts
And in their books
Will condense and harden
Maybe for many to read

They are dying serving the reading masses
The market requiring their total perdition
The Earth has brought up so many poets indeed
That the choice is so strict
The criterion is as high as stars
And to break away from the colleagues
One has to make a harakiri
But in a natural way
Without an obvious self-promotion

So why the limelight is focused on poets?
Why the spear is pointing to them?
Who marked them as victims?
Many genres' creators are lost in guessing
Painters
Composers
Are silently standing aside
Not understanding
Or keeping the secret

Even writers and other authors close to them
Are nodding their heads understandingly
They are within a half a step from this
They they have only to sharpen their images a bit
And add a hair of spontaneity
And still they aren't doing the step
Into the poets' meat-grinder.

Florida, 19 October 2013

(Translation from Russian original: http://www.stihi.ru/2013/10/21/1305)