«Depriving me of sea, of a space to run and space to fly, / And giving my footsteps the brace of a forced land. / What have you gained? The calculation dazzles. / But you cannot seize the movement of my lips, their silent sound.»
«Under such blows / your narrow shoulders will redden / and flame, even in the snow. Your childlike hands / will lift up irons / and weave the heaviest ropes. Barefoot on glass / your slight feet will go, / barefoot on glass in the blooded sand. And I will bum for you / like a black ...»
«Somehow we got through the miles of Moscow, / left the Sparrow Hills, and found the small, familiar church. / Our open sled was filled with straw, and roughly hooded / with coarse, frozen cloth that hurt us. Then in Uglitch the children played knucklebones. / When we drove through it, I rea...»
«I spoke with a child's gibberish to authority, / I was afraid to eat oysters, / I looked at the guardsmen out of the corner of my eye. Everyone tortured me about this. / but how could I sulk in the foolish beaver miter of a bishop / by the Egyptian porticoes of the banks? No gypsy girl eve...»