Osip Mandelshtam
Not as the floury moth returns...

Not as the floury moth returns,
whenever the term of my ashes ends
I want my conscious body to turn
into a road and the land’s extent,
a vertebrate body the heavens have burnt
until just coal, aware of its length.

Plain-spelt gigantic wreaths,
the cries of dark-green conifer,
rest on death’s artillery pieces.
Life and time fall headlong
into those wells, the wreaths’
hoops of red-bannered conifer...

That call those comrades followed was final:
it took them to serve in brutal skies.
The silent infantry passed with their rifles,
those exclamations borne shoulder-wise.

With anti-aircraft guns by the thousand,
it passed and passed in disarray, that throng
of a thousand eyes both blue and brown.
And who’s due now to be following on?

Translated by Alistair Noon