Sergey Esenin
Mare Ships

1.

If the wolf bays a star
Cloud has consumed the sky.
Ripped-open bowels of mares,
And the crows’ black sails glide by.

The azure thrusts no claws
Through the snow’s coughing stench.
Gold-coned a garden of skulls
Circles beneath the whinnying storm.

You hear the cheerful knocking?
— Sunset raking the groves.
With chopped-off hands for oars,
You row to the promised land.

Swim higher, higher yet.
From rainbow fly, crow-crake.
Soon will the white tree let
Fall my head’s yellow leaf.

2.

Who are you calling, field?
Is this a pleasant dream?
— Blue cavalry, the rye
Outpacing woods and villages.

Not rye but frost leaps the field.
Smashed windows, gaping doors.
Even the sunlight freezes
Like a gelding’s stale piss.

My Russia, is this you ? Whose bucket
Scours the scum of your snows ?
Along the roads the voracious hounds
Of dawn devour the land.

They need not fly ‘thither’:
Warmer to survive with man.
God tossed the she-wolf a child,
Man ate the she-wolf’s cub.

3.

Who’s then to sing ? O who,
In this mad blush of corpses?
Look: women hatch a third
Eye slowly from the womb.

There! He crawls out, regards
The moon, sees no fleshed bone.
I sang the wondrous guest, it’s clear,
In self-derision.

And where are the other
Eleven with their tapers?
If you must marry, poet,
Take a sheep in a byre.

Involve with straw and wool;
Word-wax warm when you sing.
Evil October strews from the brown
Birch-hands its rings.

4.

You beasts, come near, weep out
Your grief in my cupped hands.
Isn’t it time the moon
Stopped lapping the sky’s clouds?

Bitch-sisters, brother-hounds!
I join you in the human pen.
Needing no ships of mares,
No sails of ravens.

If from the broken walls
Hunger seize me by the hair,
Half my leg TH eat myself,
And half toss you to gnaw.

I do not go with man;
Better to starve with you
Than with a loved-one raise the ground,
Stone for a fellow maniac.

5.

Yet I will sing! I’ll sing!
Insulting neither goat
Nor hare. If we can mourn a thing,
So can we smile at it.

We all bear the apple of joy.
Close is the blast of the thief.
Autumn’s wise gardener
Will crop my head’s yellow leaf.

Only one path to dusk garden.
October wind bullies the grove.
To know all things, and take nothing,
A poet came into the world.

He came to kiss the cows,
Heart-hear the oaten crunch.
Cut deeper, sickle-poems.
Strew bird-cherry, bush of the sun!

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley