Sergey Esenin
Hooligan

A shower with its damp brooms scours
The fields of the willows’ refuse.
Spit on, O wind, your leaves in showers.
I am a hooligan like you.

I love it when the blue groves heave
As heavy-gaited bullocks
Their stomachs rumbling with leaves
Stain the trunks on their knees.

And here they are, my cows!
Who better than I to sing them ?
I see, I see the dark blot out
The footmarks made by passing men.

O Russia, my wooden Russia!
I am your last poet. I fed
The sadness of my brutish poems
On mignonette and mint. So, then,

Midnight, draw up the moon’s jug
And ladle the milk of the birches.
It seems as if the graveyard loved
To choke men with its crosses!

Black terror walks the hills and floods
Our garden with the robber’s stealth.
Only, I am the thief, by blood
One of the horse-thieves of the steppe.

Ah, who has watched the trees at night
Boiling in wind ? I should have been
Out on the blue steppes, lying in wait,
With a great club somewhere unseen.

A bush was my pillow, and song
With its slavery my nurse.
In a tower of feelings I live condemned
To the endless treadmill of verse.

Ah, senseless wind, I mean no wrong.
In peace blow your leaves about.
Spare me the name of poet. In song,
I too am hooligan, and lout.

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley