Sergey Esenin
The Reply

Dear old lady,
live on as you are living.
Tenderly in my heart I hold
your love, your memory.
But only you, perhaps,
can understand nothing
of my life, my purposes.

You have winter now,
and on these moonlit nights,
I know, you are not alone
in thinking
that someone is swaying
the cherry tree
and spreads snow
at the window.

Flesh of my flesh!
Well, how can you sleep
in a blizzard ?
It roars so woebegone,
so long drawn out
in the chimney.
You’d like to go to sleep,
but you see
not a pillow, but a narrow grave,
in which you are being buried.

Like a thousand
snuffling demons
it screams and wails —
riff-raff blizzard!
and the snow falls
like flocks of birds,
and there is neither wife
nor friend beyond the grave.

I love the spring,
most of all,
I love the ravine,
with the striving brook,
where every splinter’s
like a ship —
such spaciousness
the eye cannot fathom.

But the Spring I love
I call
the great Revolution.
Only for her
do I suffer and scandalize,
only her do I wait for,
and invoke.

But this filth —
this cold cold planet!
Why shouldn’t it burn,
burn at the Lenin sun!
This is why
I started my rowdying,
started drinking, acting up,
with the sick soul of a poet.

But the time will come,
sweet old lady,
the longed for hour will strike!
we did not take up arms
for nothing,
this one the machine-gun,
this one the pen.

Forget about money, then,
forget everything.
What disaster!?
Is this you? Is it?
You see, I'm not a cow,
a horse, a sheep
to be led
out of its stall.

I will leave myself
when the hour comes round,
when we must
burn about the planet,
and, returning, then
I’ll buy you that shawl,
and buy those things for Dad.

Meanwhile, the storm howls on,
like a thousand
snuffling demons
sings and screams —
riff-raff blizzard!
and the snow falls
like flocks of birds,
and there is neither wife
nor friend beyond the grave.

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley