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At the high fire in the forest's heart.
Your eyes have grown dull, your tears cloudy,
Your hair is gray.
You don't understand the songs birds sing
Anymore, nor stars, nor summer lightning.
Don't hear it when the women strike
The tambourine; yet you fear the silence.
I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart'. . .
--'You've come to put me in the grave.
Where is your shovel and your spade?
You're carrying just a flute.
I'm not going to blame you,
Sadly a long time ago
My voice fell mute.
Have my clothes to wear,
Answer my fears with silence,
Let the wind blow
Through your hair, smell the lilac.
You have come by a hard road
To be lit up by this fire.'
And one went away, ceding
The place to another, wandered
Like a blind woman reading
An unfamiliar narrow path,
And still it seemed to her a flame
Was close. . . In her hand a tambourine . . .
And she was like a white flag,
And like the light of a beacon.
1912
The days long prophesied have come to pass.
The world has no more miracles. Don't break
My heart, song, but be still: you are the last.
Not long ago you took your morning flight
With all a swallow's free accomplishment.
Now that you are a hungry beggar-woman,
Don't go knocking at the stranger's gate.
1917
Hot, meet everyone again,
To stroll broad avenues in the seashore garden
Full of the wind and the sun.
Even the dead, today, have agreed to come,
And the exiles, into my house.
Lead the child to me by the hand.
Long I have missed him.
I shall eat blue grapes with those who are dead,
Drink the iced
Wine, and watch the gray waterfall pour
On to the damp flint bed.
-----------------------
Behind the lake the moon's not stirred
And seems to be a window through
Into a silent, well-lit house,
Where something unpleasant has occured.
Has the master been brought home dead,
The mistress run off with a lover,
Or has a little girl gone missing,
And her shoes found by the creek-bed . . .
We can't see. But feel some awful thing,
And we don't want to talk.
Doleful, the cry of eagle-owls, and hot
In the garden the wind is blustering.
1922
I drink to our demolished house,
To all this wickedness,
To you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass--
And to the dead-cold eyes
The lie that has betrayed us,
The coarse, brutal world, the fact
That God has not saved us.
1934
I have been spared to mourn for you and weep,
Not as a frozen willow over your memory,
But to cry to the world the names of those who sleep.
What names are those!
I slam shut the calendar,
Down on your knees, all!
Blood of my heart,
The people of Leningrad march out in even rows,
The living, the dead : fame can't tell them apart.
1942
