Vladimir Mayakovsky
A few words about myself

I love to watch children dying.
Do you note, behind protruding nostalgia,
the shadowy billow of laughter’s surf?
But I —
in the reading room of the streets —
have leafed so often through the volume of the coffin.
Midnight
with sodden hands has fingered
me
and the battered paling,
and the crazy cathedral galloped
in drops of downpour upon the cupola's bald pate.
I have seen Christ escape from an icon,
and the slush tearfully kiss
the wind-swept fringe of his tunic.
At bricks I bawl,
thrusting the dagger of desperate words
into the swollen pulp of the sky:
"Sun!
Father mine!
If at least thou wouldst have mercy and stop tormenting me!
For my blood thou spilled gushes down this nether road.
That is my soul yonder
in tatters of torn cloud
against a burnt-out sky
upon the rusted cross of the belfry!
Time!
You lame icon-painter,
will you at least daub my countenance
and frame it as a freak of this age!
I am as lonely as the only eye
of a man on his way to the blind!"

Translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey