The next day
after the war is over,
skeletons of swallows will return.
They won’t have beaks,
and their white, hard-boiled eyes
will fly three inches ahead of their semi-transparent faces –
or sometimes on their side.
Skeletons of babies will start whimpering in the cradles,
and the skeleton of a doggy will dig itself out of the ashes.
It will try to find its collar,
but it will fail and disintegrate melancholically into mush and bones.
The skeleton of a man in a gas-mask will come out onto the porch,
and will be looking for a long time
at the skeletons of chickens digging the radioactive ashes
and listening to the pensive caving of crows’ skeletons
on the fritted skeletons of lampposts.
When he hears a soft remote honking,
he will look up at the sky, startled.
But in the black sky, there won’t be any bombers anymore,
and only skeletons of cranes with fly
so high above the land, so smoothly, so strangely,
that the skeleton of a man will smile and understand
that everything is already over,
that everything is going to be good
from now on.

– Sergey Gerasimov