You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
As the future ripens in the past,so the past rots in the future –a terrible festival of dead leaves.
I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch – The gently sloping path across the wood, The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.
Without love, I’m more at ease, I’m sure. The sky is high, the mountain wind is sweeping, And all my thoughts are innocent and pure.
If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.
And in the depths of music, I didn’t find the answer,And again there was silence, and again the ghost of summer.
I know: yes, no, even I must tear offThe delicate daisy petals.Everyone on earth is destined to feelThe torments of love.
For this gloomy beast within my breast – A heart. But the thing is,We’ve all had to learn not to sleep for three years.In the morning we shall find outWho has died in the night.
I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again.
Forgive me that I felt forsaken, That grief and angst was all I knew. Forgive me that I kept mistaking Too many other men for you.
No one else was as close and as open, No one else so boiled my blood, Even he, who consigned me to torment, Even he, who caressed and forgot.
I’m not weeping, I’m not complaining,Happiness is not for me.
All’s taken away: my love and my power.The body, thrown into city it hates,Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hourThe blood grows colder in my veins.
But I am not allowed to forgetThe taste of the tears of yesterday.
Once taken by her, you glowedAnd you drank her poisons, content. Because all the stars seemed to grow,And fields had a different scent,Autumn fields.
And you know, I agree to everything:I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy,Darkness will be light and sin lovely.
Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed,And stands there like a window open wideInto a hushed and brightly lit abodeWhere something dreadful has occurred inside.
Song falls silent, music is dumb,But the air burns with their fragrance,And white winter, on its knees,Observes everything with reverent attention.
Why is it that you still beguile me –As wind, stone, bird – and all the likes? Why is that you smile on me – With sudden summer lightning strikes?
All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner,prison, or the torture chamber.
In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.
Let whoever wants to, relax in the south,And bask in the garden of paradise.Here is the essence of northand it’s autumnI’ve chosen as this year’s friend.
It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.