Marina Tsvetaeva
Poems to Blok. 15. Without a call, without a word...

15

Without a call, without a word,
like snow softly sliding off the roof,
can it be you’ve come back?
Are you asleep in a cradle?

Brightly you burn,
icon lamp only a few weeks old . . .
Who among mortal women
is rocking your cradle?

Blissful burden,
prophetic reed,
who will tell me
in what crib you are sleeping?

Let me be worthy,
no other thought in mind,
trudging the Russian earth,
walking the whole country —

Yes, I'll walk
from end to end of the midnight earth
(Where is his mouth — a wound —
and the leaden blue of his eyes?)

To find and hold him, to love
no one but him . . .
Who will whisper to me
where he is sleeping?

Seed pearls upon the foam-white
cradle curtains, the sleepy
gauze that enfolds him.
                                      Not laurels but sharp
thorns, the shadow's cast by his pleated bonnet.

It is not the curtains that part,
it is the wings of a bird,
white, outstretched! . . .
To be bom again, only to be
caught in the blizzard again.

To find him . . . To lift him
over the storm wind . . . To hold him
and not let go!
O, who will whisper to me
telling me where he is cradled?

But perhaps
all that I do is useless.
You lie in the earth
perhaps, till those trumpets blow . . .

I see the curve
of your temples. Such
fatigue! The trumpets
might not awake you!

Powerful silence,
a hopeful, a rusted silence.
Ah, if the watchman would show me
the cradle where you are sleeping . . .

Translated by Denise Levertov