Sergey Esenin
Hooligan

The rain is sweeping
Willow litter about the meadows.
Wind, replete with fagots of leaves, —
I am a hooligan, like you.

I like it when the blue thickets,
As oxen with a heavy trudge,
Muddy their trunks, on their knees.
Their bellies rattling with foliage.

Here it is, my orange herd!
Who could have sung it better?
I see, I see the twilight caressing
The prints of a man's feet.

My Russia, wooden Russia!
I am only your singer and herald,
I fed the melancholy of my animilistic poems
With mignonette and mint.

Glimmer, midnight, the jug of the moon
Should I scoop up the birch trees milk!
As if the churchyard crosses
Desired to choke somebody!

Black dismay is wandering about the hills,
The thief's gloom is flowing in our garden,
But it is I, myself, a robber and a cad
And in my blood, — a horse thief of the steppes.

Who saw the bird cherry's troops
Burning in the night?
I'd rather stand alone with a tassel
Somewhere on the blue steppe, at night.

Ah but the bush of my head is withering,
The song's captivity has engulfed me
I am condemned to turning poetic millstones
About the drudgery of emotions.

But don't you be afraid, my insane wind,
Replete with leaves, blowing calmy about the meadows
The 'poet' signature will not destroy me,
I am in the songs, like you, a hooligan.

Translated by Lyuba Coffey