Sergey Esenin
Song about Bread

This gives sense to our human life of pain
In the course of its unmitigated plight.
The sickle cuts the heavy ears of grain,
Just as it cuts the snared swan by the throat.

Far back we learned how at break of day
Through the August fields the chill creeps.
Among the scattered sheaves of bound straw,
Each sheaf is lying like a yellow corpse.

On a hay cart piled like a catafalque,
They are trundled off to a sepulchral vault.
Like attendant deacons, the braying mares gawk,
As the cart driver performs the final rite.

And later deliberately but without malice,
They are laid to rest on the barn floor beams
Where their small bones are knocked loose
To be thrashed from their fragile limbs.

No one expects their heads to rise again
From straw — any more than falling on weeds.
At the man-eating mill — its teeth gnashing,
The grain’s bones are shoved in its mouth to be ground.

And from the shapeless yeast-growing dough
A pile of tasty loaves comes from the oven...
The whitish ferment enters the stomach hole
Where it grows full like a fertilized ovum.

For the harshness of the harvester’s grip and the grain-spirit juice,
And all the beating and neighing of mares doused in full sunlight
Now the straw-colored bread’s what he savors
And the millstone of ferment toxin in his gut.

And whistling across the land in autumn,
Charlatan, murderer, evil braggart...
The sickle comes cutting the ears of grain,
Just as it cuts the snared swan by the throat.

Translated by Don Mager