Here is the long-bided hour: the labor of years is accomplished.
Why should this sadness unplumbed secretly weigh on my heart?
Is it, my work being done, I stand like a laborer, useless,
One who has taken his pay, alien to unwonted tasks?
Is it the work I regret, the silent companion of midnight,
Friend of the golden-haired Dawn, friend of the gods of the hearth?
Миг вожделенный настал: окончен мой труд многолетний.
Что ж непонятная грусть тайно тревожит меня?
Или, свой подвиг свершив, я стою, как подёнщик ненужный,
Плату приявший свою, чуждый работе другой?
Или жаль мне труда, молчаливого спутника ночи,
Друга Авроры златой, друга пенатов святых?
«Upon the cobbles / of my foot-clobbered soul, / the steps of loonies / twine their grinding rhymes. / Where the towns / are hung / and in the nooses of clouds / the crooked necks of towers / are wrung, / I start to cry / because / by the crossroads / the cops are crucified.»
«Please Listen! / If stars are lit, / it is something / that somebody needs? / Someone wants them / To be and to last, / Even calls them pearls, those specs of spit. / And suffocating / In the blizzards of midday dust, / He bursts in on God, / afraid it's too late to s...»
«I am back in my city, dear to me like my tears / Like small veins, swollen glands of my infancy years. You have come here, now go ahead in one gulp / Down the fish-oil of Leningrad’s river lights lamps Can you make out this day of December that’s marred / By the egg-yolk stirred into the...»
«We exist out of touch with the land underneath / Our words from ten paces conceal our grief / Just the Kremlin's highlander's voice's present. / The soul crusher and slayer of peasants (Version. / Where's enough for a half talk words landed, / They'll remind of the Kremlin's highlander.)...»