Poems by Varlam Shalamov
1949
1950
1952
1954
1955
- Alive not by bread alone...
- All that is human slips away...
- And so I keep going...
- Our court nightingale...
- Purple Honey
- They say we plough shallow...
«Return into the lap of incest / From where you have descended, Leah, / That yellow twilight you preferred / To golden sun of Ilion. Go forward, not a hand will touch you, / To father's chest, when night is dead, / And let the night the incest-maker / Let drop your head. But fateful cha...»
«Behold, this air, made drunk with haze / Upon Kremlin's black square — / Maniacs shake the world in craze, / And poplars smell of fear. From wax cathedrals' shapes are wrung, / A thick belltower forest, / Just like a robber without tongue / In stone rafters lost. And in imprinted cat...»
«In St. Petersburg again we come together, / As though Sun inside there we interred / As though for the first time and forever / We pronounced the blessed, thoughtless word. / In black velvet of a Soviet even, / In black velvet global emptiness, / Sing the darling eyes of blissful women, ...»
«On a pearl shuttle you spin / A thread of silk so fragile / Come forth, you fingers agile, / Lesson in charms begin. Movements of arms about / Their ebbs and flows in flight — / To cause some solar fright / You cast a charm, no doubt When your broad hand's on fire / Like shell grow...»