'The Year of Arachne' by Anna Piwkowska, poetry translation

Translated from Polish 

Arachne is hungry and enraged.
Starved like a vagrant
who for his daily late relief
buys cheese and a dog bone
at the shop, like an accidental thief.
Arachne weaves the most delicate of webs,
and yet, so fraught with consequence
that even young babes wake
screaming in the restless night
when into the web a red admiral
slips his slender mothlike head
under her sting, like on a scaffold.
A bazaar of brittle bug bodies,
a slaughter of the chitinous innocents,
whether a ritual or rite
no one cares to guess tonight,
for the Earth is eclipsed by the locust
Golgothas. A butterfly sways upon a pin
in the album of forgotten dates.
The year of the first war. The year of huntsmen
dressed in their insect masks.
They bore underground, a patrol of
living boyish figures, perforated helmets
ring in the dark with a dull dirge,
death is nourished by a girl's loving
glance, by carmine lips engulfed
in a cloud of menthol smoke,
like from a cigarette. The second pounce
of Arachne. The year of the second war.
Once more, a fly falls into the web,
one then another, a thousand corps,
a plague, a cry, an insect concerto,
like death draped in a long cloth treading
over dead bees, one enormous moth.
Smoke dims the light, the fire burns bright,
flames swallow the Golgothas and the gulags,
hungry Arachne weaves her web,
who will redeem the chitinous bodies,
so they may rise from the dead on the Great Night?

The original poem, "Rok Arachne", is available at Zeszyty Literackie: https://zeszytyliterackie.pl/1156-2/