Vladimir Mayakovsky
Morning

The sullen rain
cast a glance
askance.
Beyond the still
clear grille —
the iron reasoning of wires strung overhead —
a featherbed.
And on it
rested lightly
the legs of rising stars.
But as
the streetlamps — tsars
in crowns of gas —
began to die,
they made more painful for the eye
the petty wars
of the bouquet of boulevard whores.
And horrid,
the lurid
peeking laughter
that jokes leave after
arose
from the yellow roses'
poisoned rows
in a zig-zag.
But at the back
of all the wrack -
ing horror
and the squalor
the eye rejoiced, at last;
the slave of crosses
sufferingly-placidly-indifferent,
the coffins
of the brothels
full of riff-raff
were flung into one flaming vase by the
dawning East.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg