From: ibshambat@gmail.com   
      
   1   
      
   Poet - from afar starts a speech.   
   Poet - for long leads the speech.   
      
   With planets, with signs, with roundabout   
   Tales's potholes... between yes and nay   
   He even having swung from the belfry   
   Took out the hook... For comets' way   
      
   Is poets' way.  The torn links of causation -   
   That's his connection! Forehead up - despair!   
   You know that the eclipses of the poets   
   Are not foretold by the calendar.   
      
   He's he, who mixes cards together,   
   Who does deceive all count and weight,   
   He's he, who asks from the school desk,   
   Who towers head and shoulders over Kant,   
      
   Who is just like a tree in its own beauty   
   Within the stone coffin of Bastille.   
   He is a train on which late are all comers,   
   Whose traces have been chilled   
      
   Always... For comets' way   
   Is poets' way: burning and not warming.   
   Tearing, not growing - to break up and tear -   
   Your pathway, o the mantled curved one,   
   Is not foretold by a calendar!   
      
   2   
      
   There are the extras, the unneeded   
   That do not fit within the norm.   
   (Not counting in your dictionaries   
   To them the landfill is their home).   
      
   There are the hollow, the pushed-down,   
   There are the mute - like dung,   
   Nail - to your silken skirt hem!   
   Dirt from under the wheels is wrung!   
      
   There are the unseen, the imaginary:   
   (Sign: speck of an autumn hen!)   
   There are the Jobs within the world   
   That would have envied Job - when:   
      
   We're poets - and in rhyme with scapegoats,   
   But from the shore thus having gone,   
   We argue over God with goddesses   
   And argue over girls with gods!   
      
   3   
      
   What should I do, blind and a stepson,   
   When all have fathers and have eyes,   
   When on anathema like embankments   
   Of passion! Where runny nose is the   
   Name of cry!   
      
   What should I do, with rib and thought   
   Singing! - like wire! Siberia! Sunburn!   
   Upon your dreams - like on the bridge!   
   With their weightlessness   
   In weights' world.   
      
   What should I do, singer and firstborn,   
   When gray is blackest in the world!   
   Where inspiration's like in thermos!   
   With this measurelessness in   
   Measures' world?!   
      
   By Marina Tsvetayeva   
   Translated from Russian by Ilya Shambat   
   https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambat   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)