Why did you pollute the water,
with vileness adulterate my bread?
Why did you make the final freedom
into a den of thieves instead?
Was it because I did not mock
the bitter fate of friends?
Was it because I’d not betrayed
my piteous native land?
So be it. There can be no poet
without a butcher and a butcher’s block.
Weeping we go, with guttering candle,
garbed in penitential smock.
Зачем вы отравили воду
И с грязью мой смешали хлеб?
Зачем последнюю свободу
Вы превращаете в вертеп?
За то, что я не издевалась
Над горькой гибелью друзей?
За то, что я верна осталась
Печальной родине моей?
Пусть так. Без палача и плахи
Поэту на земле не быть.
Нам покаянные рубахи,
Нам со свечой идти и выть.
«Wait for me and I’ll come back, / But wait with might and main. / Wait throughout the gloom and rack / Of autumn’s yellow rain. / Wait when snowstorms fill the way, / Wait in summer’s heat, / Wait when, false to yesterday, / Others do not wait. / Wait when from afar at last / ...»
«Sweetly I faint / from the still air and dreams, / From long pervasive tedium / and halting song; / I like the cockerels / embroidered on whit...»
«By our black bread, our faithful wife, / With a pallid impotence we are infected... The years were tried with hoof and stone, / With deathless wormwood the waters saturated. / And bitter wormwood taints our lips... / The knife’s not for us to handle, / The pen not ours by inclination, /...»
«A girl sang in the cathedral choir / Of all the ships that had gone to sea, / Of all the travellers lost and tired, / Of all who’d forgotten what joys may be. And on her white shoulder a sunbeam glistened, / As up her voice soared to the dome’s far height, / And in the darkness all wa...»