Sergey Esenin
Letter from my Mother

What’s left now
to think about?
What’s now
to write about?
Before me on
the gloomy table
lies open
a letter from my mother.

‘Come to us, darling,’
she writes,
‘for the Christmas
holidays.
Buy me a shawl,
trousers for Dad.
So many things
we’re short of.

I don’t like it,
you being a poet,
you’ve got such
a shocking name.
Much better you’d
followed the plough
in the field from a lad.

I’m old now,
and sick;
if only you’d
been here at home,
I’d have
a daughter,
and a grandson at my knee.

But you’ve scattered
children about the world,
given your wife away
to another man;
you have no family or friend,
you’re deep in pub
water with no moorings.

My darling son,
what’s wrong with you ?
You used to be so sweet,
so unassuming,
everyone used to say,
how happy he is,
Sergei Esenin.

Well, our hopes in you
have come to nothing.
And it’s all the more
galling and sick to me
that your father
hoped you’d get
more money for your poetry.

Whatever you got,
you never sent it home
to us.
That’s why
words fade so bitterly, —
I know
from your experience -
people don’t give poets money.

I don’t like it,
your being a poet,
you’ve got such
a shocking name.
Much better you’d
followed the plough
in the field from a lad.

Everything’s dreary now.
We live in the dark.
We have no horse.
If you were here at home,
it would be all right —
with your brain
you’d get to be president
of the local soviet.

Then we’d be jolly,
no one’d drag at us,
and you wouldn’t have
this useless tiredness.
I’d make your wife spin,
and you would look after us
in our old age,
like a son should.’
• • •
I crumple the letter,
plunged into horror.
Is there no way clear
of this predestined path ?
But everything I think
I’ll tell now
in the letter I answer with.

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley