Was it not you Who in the time of sorrow Cast down The scales and the sword And licensed the berserk To weigh the good and evil?
Was it not you Who kneaded peoples Solidly and densely, Leavening the dough With blood and tears, Who now tramples down, fierce, Human clusters, By fury overtaken?
Was it not you Who flung the poet Onto the agorae of the universe For him To be the orb and ear?
Was it not you Who dispossessed Our arms of vigor And forbade us To stack offences up On the deep dish Of earthly scales, But decreed That we become A pointer marking The difference in weight?
Was it not you Who forced the heart to bless The murderer and murdered, The enemy and kinfolk?
Was it not you Who compelled the mind To reconcile itself To the fulfillment Of your unfathomable ways -- Ablaze with contradictions Incongruous with humanly Restricted thought?
Give us the strength To swear by the wisdom Of bloodsheds past; Allow to see, Through death and time, The brawl of nations As a spasm of passion Ejecting seeds Of otherworldly flora!
1915, Paris
My bonfire on the shore was burning down. I heard the rustling sound of streaming glass. The acrid soul of wistful wormwood wound Through languid darkness, swayed, and flowed past.
The granite crags resemble fractured wings. The weight of hills bends down a spinal cord. The no-man's land is stiff and suffering. The mouth of Earth has been denied the word!
A child of the inquisitive dark nights, I am your eyes, wide-open to invite The gaze of ancient stars, those lonesome lights Whose prying rays reach out into the night.
I am your mouth of stone, your voiceless lyre! By silence fettered, I have grown as mute As extinct suns. I am the frozen fire Of words. I am the sightless, wingless you.
O captive mother! How at night I bend To feel your bosom - only you can see The bitter smoke, the wormwood's bitter scent, The bitterness of waves - will stay in me.
1906
The twilight has imbued the hills with antique gold And gall. The shredded, shaggy steppe, lit up bright red And brown, flows like chestnut fur in strands aglow. The shrubs burst into flame, the waters blaze like metal.
Eroded hollows lay bare enormous blocks of rock And boulders piled up, mysterious, morose. The winged dusk uncovers hints and figures... Here are the bared teeth of jaws a-grinning, a massive paw
At rest, a dubious hill resembling a swollen rib cage. Whose crooked spine, instead of hair, has sprouted thyme? Who lives around here: a monster? or a titan?
It's close and stifling where I am... But there, In that vast expanse, the scents of rotting grass And iodine suffuse the air, and the weary Ocean pants.
1907
To Lydia Zinoviev-Annibal
For days on end we sailed the river Ocean To meet the day; our sails are stretched and sure Our course, resistless land propels our motion; The voice of waves grows weary and obscure,
The orb of day goes blind and burns carnation- red; at last, night falls, and, like a lure, A land appears far off, whose vegetation Is meager, blue from fog, its crags yet bluer.
We're heading for Persephone's dark chapel, The land whose slopes are dressed in horse-tail, fern, Black yew-trees, poplars, willows. There we yearn
Midst wistful groves to hear the muffled babble Of brooks, to reach the spot where day declines, Where shadows meet and grief with grief aligns.
Your love is like the Milky Way Whose stellar dew inside me glimmers. In dreams, its hidden torment shimmers Like diamonds rippling in the waves.
You are, like astral fluid, bitter, The light of tears that pierces graves. I am the skyline that obeys The dawn, its blind and useless glitter.
I pity night... Is it because Its stellar agony will cause A death and harden thus our hearts?
My day is like blue ice... Behold! The stars grow dim, as night departs At dawn and softly enters cold.
March 1907 Petersburg
The barren slope of the meandering valley Is overgrown with hoary, wiry grass. Spurge shows up white. Eroded beds of clay Reveal the sparkling lead and shale and mica.
The water-worn and slaty walls sprout capers; A crevice clasps the olive's withered trunk; Above the hill, the violet Karadag Rears up his summits in a jagged ridge.
The sultriness has wrapped the hills in haze. The fumes of grass, mercurial reflections, The screams of cicadae and birds of prey –
Make dull the senses, cause the heat to quaverÐ And yonder, through their yawning orbits, gaze The trampled-out eyes of a colossal Face.
Koktebel, 1907, April
A sacred wood was here. The messenger of gods Would let his winged foot fall lightly on these glades. The onetime site of cities kept no trace of their ruin. In flocks, sheep creep along the bronze inclines.
The slopes are woodless. In the green twilight, the mountains Form a jagged crown, mysteriously sad. Whose ancient anguish stung my prophesying spirit? Who knows the path divine - where it starts and ends?
The pebbles of eroded screes crackle underfoot Distinctly, as before. The ancient sea boils over The roaring sandbanks, heaving foamy crests.
The starlit nights pass one by one in tears. The gloomy faces of the cast-off gods command And beckon, stare and call me forth - resistless.
The stoop of oaks lifts up the chrome of clouds. Cliffs harbour alcoves, niches, grottos deep. And rain and wind and heat have left their traces Into these stones engraved. A sketch is grooved Onto the slope, crayoned by lichen, framed by moss, And walls of rock rise up as icon-cases. The cinnabar and niello here, yonder - Vestiges of gilding and of icons The cryptic visages time-worn...
1909
1.
The pearl bejeweling the quiet of night, The gem of the lagoon's star-studded base! Your light makes young and pallid every face, Thorn-apple longs for You in love-lorn plight.
Love's anguish echoes in the hearts the tunes That, string-like strummed, Your rays set loose. Uneasy dreams revive and reproduce In haunting hues the once disquieting moons.
Your humid glow and faded shadows, falling Upon the walls, the stairway, and the flooring, Throw tints of turquoise onto stones, finesse
The leaf of plane toward greater yet indention, Endowing strands of vine with greater fineness. Dreams' luminary! Mistress of conception!
Koktebel, 1913
Full-blossomed, blue-grey and milky, the day froze still; The sea, grown pallid, sobs as it kisses the sand; The wings of the mist Shed splashes of brine...
Humility envelops the heart. Quiet Thoughts die away. In the orchard, the olive Stretches her boughs to the blind sky With the gesture of a slave...
1910
A somber adolescent, I roamed The acrid valleys Of wistful Cimmerea, My sightless spirit Pining With the anguish of the ancient land. And in the twilight in the folds And depths of bays I waited for the sign and call, And once, before the break of day, I watched Orion rise And realised The horror of the blinded planet, My orphanhood and sonhood Boundless warmth and pity Overfill me. My love for the human body Is inconsolable. I know The flame That languishes in bodily separation. I like to hold in hand Dry burning fingers And read man's destiny Along the lines of prophesying palms. But I was not conferred the gift Of undivided love for one: I abandon all, forgetting no one. I never have disturbed what grows, Nor have I ever plucked A budding flower, Picking only ripened fruits, Thus lightening overburdened boughs. And if I was the source of pain It only was because I pitied those towards whom One should have been unfeeling at the time, Because I wasn't willing To exhaust to death Those, who asking for compassion, Begged wholeheartedly For annihilation...
1911
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