Long centuries of centuries will pass, unsighted
Millenniums as locusts in deathy clouds descend,
And in the muttering of centuries affrighted
The same enduring firmament will watch the end.
The dumb, dead firmament—that God will not remember,
Who breathes Eternity behind the farther skies,
Beyond the fading of the last star's last slow ember,
Beyond the utter threshold words may scrutinize.
Forever cold, that starry desert, clouds out-topping,
Is flung forth, alien to the end, on space,
When tearing comet-fires will crumble with it, dropping
As dumbly burning tears from a despairing face.
Пройдут века веков, толпы́ тысячелетий,
Как туча саранчи, с собой несущей смерть,
И в быстром ропоте испуганных столетий
До горького конца пребудет та же твердь, —
Немая, мёртвая, отвергнутая Богом,
Живущим далеко в беззвёздных небесах,
В дыханьи Вечности, за гранью, за порогом
Всего понятного, горящего в словах.
Всегда холодная, пустыня звёзд над нами
Останется чужой до горького конца,
Когда она падёт кометными огнями,
Как брызги слёз немых с печального лица.
«The gun battery was over there, behind that hill. / We cannot hear it, but its thunder remains still, / around us, the corpses lie beneath the snow, / and in the icy air, their arms are still flailing. / Who would dare to trample this field now? / Today, the dead ones rise again. Now they...»
«I bid farewell to everything I was, / everything I despised, disliked, and loved. And now, a new life begins, / I bid farewell to yesterday’s skin. About me, I no longer need any news. / I bid goodbye — right to the marrow. At last, I look down on what I was, / see my separate soul, n...»
«The land swallows itself whole / and nuzzles the heavens, / patches up its memory’s holes / with grasses and a man. The grass is under horse’s hoofs, / the soul in a box of bones, / and only the word, the word alone, / looms under the full moon. Like Nineveh, the steppe stretches...»
«And now summer has left / as if it never came at all. / It’s warm still where the sun falls. / But it’s not enough. Whatever I wanted to happen / fell right into my hands / like a five-fingered leaf. / But it’s not enough. The just and unjust / played their necessary part / a...»