Sergey Esenin
Hooligan

The rain cleans the willow dung
Off the meadows with its wet brooms.
Go ahead, wind, spit your clumps of leaves.
I’m a hooligan just like you.

I love it when your blue woods,
Like oxen with heavy steps,
Soil the knees of the trunks
With their foliage-wheezing bellies.

Here it is, my ginger herd!
Who better to sing it praises?
Yes, yes, I see how the twilight
Licks the human footprints.

Russia! My wooden Russia!
I alone am your bard and town crier.
I’ve fed the sadness of my beastly verses
With mignonette and mint.

Rustle up, midnight, the jug of the moon
To scoop up the milk of the birches!
It’s as if the churchyard would like to strangle
Someone with its hands made of crosses!

Black horror walks the hills,
Stirring a thief’s anger into our garden.
Except I’m a lout and a bandit myself
With the blood of a steppe horse thief.

Who among you has seen the host
Of cherry trees boil in the night?
All I want at night is to stand with a bludgeon
Somewhere in a blue steppe.

Ah, the shrub of my head has wilted,
Songs’ bondage has sucked me in.
I’m condemned to grind the millstone
Of poems in the chain gang of feelings.

But don’t worry, demented wind,
Keep calm and keep spitting your leaves over meadows.
That “poet” label won’t kill me.
I’m a hooligan just like you.

Translated by Anton Yakovlev