Osip Mandelshtam
My body, all I borrowed from the earth...

My body, all I borrowed from the earth,
I do not want it to return here —
some flour-white butterfly.
My body, scratched and chewed with thought,
I want it to become a street, a land —
it was too full of vertebrae.

The dark green pine needles howling in the wind
look like funeral wreaths thrown into the water...
how our pastimes and life were drained away!
when we sat like galley slaves at our gruelling benches —
bodies spread against a backdrop of green pine,
red flags colored like the A B C's s of a child!

The comrades of the last contingent are on the move;
no conversation; on their shoulders,
the exclamation points of rifles.
From the heights of the sky, a thousand guns,
brown eyes, blue eyes; no one sets the step — men, men, men!
Who will follow after them?

Translated by Robert Lowell