Sigitas Geda was born in 1943 in southwestern Lithuania. He is a poet and leading intellectual with more than twenty books, including literature for children, essays, reviews, and translations. He translated the book of Psalms, and most recently The Works of François Villon and Edgar Lee Master?s Spoon River Anthology. He has edited and compiled the complete selection of Rilke?s work in Lithuanian, and has done the same with Lithuanian poetry on the holocaust. He is perhaps the most important and respected writer in Lithuania today, with a lyrical voice and a post-modern aesthetic that probes historical and metaphysical themes and the natural world with incredible insight and energy. A Selected Poems has recently appeared in Germany and Sweden, and an edition will be forthcoming in English.

Kerry Shawn Keys comes from the Pennsylvania. He lives in Vilnius, Lithuania where he taught translation theory and creative composition from 1998 to 2000 as a Fulbright lecturer at Vilnius University. Mr. Keys currently works freelance as a poet, translator, and cultural liaison. He has over 30 books to his credit, including translations from Portuguese and Lithuanian, and his own poems rooted in the Appalachia hill country, and in Brazil and India where he lived for considerable time. His work ranges from theatre-dance pieces to flamenco songs to the Tao Te Ching to lyrical and intense ontological concerns. He received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1992. Selected poems have appeared in Czech and Lithuanian.

Registering The Moment (Akimirksnio Registracija)

a partridge - with clay - ruddy
underwings - the Nile?s natural hue -
landed in father?s yard -
as we were leafing through -
the third section - of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead - where
the divinity Ra is mentioned -
who at the age of six
went to see his partridge?s
nest with 24 - tiny eggs -
in the fields - in the light of tangled
blossoming peas - in the early morning
of my Latin Pater land -
after my brother?s death -

50 Years Of Arrogance (50 Arogancijos Metu)

          with Rilke, Camus, Derrida...

fifty foolish,
gambled away, squandered
years of learning, thinking, understanding
and ignorance,
almost a whole life,
and only for the sake
of going back to the meadow
by the lake for four
stolen, shining tomatoes.

Lake 1 (Ezeras I)

Fish and girl -
Souls
That concern me.

Full moon
Best augured
By a carp.

Ask the fisherman
What the waters
Tell him.

Lake-water, grey.
A grey bird
Flew over.

I?ll never forget that woman.
While making love
A mouse scurried by.

Whiter than a woman
The birch gnawed
By a beaver on the shore.

Let?s start with the ant -
How slowly it crawls
On my shoulders.

Ants know
More
Than men.

They are closest
To the damp
Earth.

Ants can pick
Bones
Cleaner than people.

If once
There was a world,
People were bones.

Blood - quite recently
The essence
Of our earth.

Milk
Must have splashed
In the heavens.

People and trees,
Beasts, and fish -
They fell with water.

Fish clearly come
From the sky -
Painful their lot on earth.

The tench lives in the sky,
Even now it can?t tell
What is vertical.

Light above,
Darkness below -
Two mothers driving life.

Colors and forms -
The tench?s belly and back -
Subtle play of two beginnings.