Sergey Esenin
Return to my Homeland

I visit again the places of my childhood,
that village
where I grew up,
where a belfry without a cross
now threw up its birch-wood watch-tower.

How much had changed here,
in their wretched, ugly lives.
How many new discoveries
followed hot upon my footsteps.

I could not pick out
our old family home.
No tell-tale maple waved at the window,
and my mother no longer sat in the porch
feeding chicks with mealy bran.

She must be old,
yes, old.
And I looked round the neighbourhood in grief.
How unfamiliar it had become to me!
Only the white mountain was the same,
and the tall
grey rock on the mountain.

And here was the graveyard,
with the crosses crooked,
as if the dead had frozen
gesticulating in vicious hand to hand fight.

Along the path,
came an old man, sweeping the dust with a broom.
‘O Stranger!
Tell me, old fellow,
where’s Tatyana Esenin’s house?’

‘Tatyana?..
Over there, behind that hut.
And what are you to her?
Relative?
Can it be — not, not her lost son?’

‘Yes, I’m her son.
But what’s the matter, dad ?
Tell me
why are you so offended?’

‘Ah, surely, son, you
recognize your grandfather?’

‘Ah, grandad, is it you?’

And the sad talk overflowed the path,
splashing the dusty flowers with warm tears.

‘You must be getting on for thirty?
And I’m ninety already,
soon in the ground.
You should have come back long ago,’
he said, all the while wrinkling his brow.
‘Yes... Time!
You’re not a Communist?’
‘No!’
‘Your sisters are Young Communists.
Nasty business. As well cut your own throat.
Yesterday they took the ikons from the shelves,
the Commissar’s taken the cross from the belfry.
Now there’s nowhere to pray to God.
I slip off into the woods myself,
and pray to the pines.
Maybe He likes it...
Well, well, come along home
and see for yourself.’

And we go along between the fields,
I smile at the woods and ploughed land,
And the old man looks at the belfry in despair.
• • •
T’m well, mother, very well.’
And again I wipe my eyes,
and indeed a cow might weep to see
their squalid little nook.
Lenin adorns a calendar on the wall.
This life belongs
to my sisters, not to me.
But still I’m ready to go down on my knees
to see you again, my beloved country.

The neighbours come round,
a woman with a child.
Already no one recognizes me.
Except our old bitch meets me at the gate,
yelping madly, as in Byron.
And sweet land, this is not you,
this is not you.
And I of course am something different.
The more my mother saddens and despairs,
the more gaily my sisters laugh.
Lenin of course is no ikon to me —
I know the world too well by half.
I love my family, and this is why
I still sit down and with an inclination
of the head, bid my sister
have her say.
And she lays on, opening
a fat Das Kapital, like a Bible,
of Marx and Engels.
I of course have no wise read
these estimable gentlemen.

And now it’s funny to me
how that bright girl
turned my whole world upside down.
• • •
And our old bitch meets me at the gate,
yelping madly as in Byron.

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley