Jakob Ziguras

Seasons in Hell

I

There is a hell of autumn—as of spring,

of winter and of summer at its full—

desire burns there like a hissing coal

and smoky mist erases everything.

The leaves are laid in musty graves like lost,

brittle remains of men with parchment skin—

thin palimpsests crisscrossed by veins of sin.

They do not burn as much as they compost.

Their dissolution is the death of form.

No flowers issue from this sordid bed

where worms entwine. This path leads to a dead

and algae-clouded mirror’s eerie calm:

a path of stones that bloom with mold like stale,

torn hunks of bread left out for crows to eat—

birds scissor-beaked with blistered human feet.

A severed tongue that slithers like a snail

has left a silver path of sticky lace

for you to follow, where young willows stare

into dim glass and wash it with their hair,

which silken curtain hides a withered face.

II

The hell of winter is a vaulting hall

lit by the most exquisite chandeliers;

they glitter with the ice of human tears,

hanging in curtains that will never fall.

Inscribing frozen glass, without a sound,

huge compasses like skaters mark the ice

with blue prints of an earthly paradise;

as forms of snow that never touch the ground,

with robes of blizzard, surgically clean,

in minds with gears of crystal calculate

the outer walls that bound the perfect state,

their faces hard as pearl and eyes serene.

They only know what can be clearly proved.

Their eyes are lenses and can only see

like microscopes or telescopically;

only the human scale leaves them unmoved.

And when they move, like lattices of stone

their wings fan silently; their very air

is frictionless. In this high atmosphere

no one can weigh a single human bone.

III

The hell of spring is like a garden, rank,

where manic flowers, wearing cloying scents,

dance in a ring a shrill ecstatic dance

like maenads tearing at a heifer’s flank:

or claw their way out of the musty loam—

their petals glossy red, or holding fans—

the long, slim hands of long-dead courtesans,

they rise up, wanton, from the fertile foam.

Another wing is hidden under glass:

a massive hothouse locked from the outside,

a humid gloom where pincered insects glide

and deadly serpents ripple in the grass.

Tumescent nature oozes sap and swells

in meaty buds, and fungi spit their spores.

It is a wound that festers under gauze

and sweats, exuding sweet and carnal smells.

So life thrusts up in unremitting bloom.

The dead cannot sleep peacefully, but must

like Venus flytraps stir in nascent lust

to be the flesh they thoughtlessly consume.

IV

The hell of summer is an empty school-

oval surrounded by a chain-link fence:

devoid of any sound of innocence;

all covered with a patchy coat of pale

and sickly yellow grass that never grows,

where even thistles abdicate and die;

where kites catch fire in a blow-torch sky;

and where a wind—ascetic, fervent—blows

a silence from the desert that will strip

from any soul the bark of words and dry

the final tear to glisten in an eye

that sees at last a distance without hope.

The barren soil does not remember rains,

a jigsaw puzzle intricately scarred.

Outside the fence, upon a throne of charred

and mangled trees, a raging fire reigns.

The furnace wind blows wisps of burning trash.

The mind is like a morning newspaper,

held in a fire till the merest stir

will crumble all its headlines into ash. 

Jakob Ziguras is a poet, translator and lapsed philosopher. Born in Poland to Polish and Greek parents, he grew up in Australia. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Chains of Snow (2013), The Sepia Carousel (2016) and Venetian Mirrors (2024). He has also published translations of Polish poetry and prose, including Jan Kott’s Kaddish: Pages on Tadeusz Kantor (2020).