Hooligan (1919)

Rain is cleaning with wet brooms

Willows' poop in the meadows

Wind, you can spit armfuls of leaves -

I am a hooligan, just like you

I love it when the blue thickets,

Like bulls with heavy step,

Stomachs wheezing with leaves,

Soil the knees of the tree trunks

Here it is, my red flock!

Who could sing to you better than I?

I can see the twilight licking human footprints...

My Russia, wooden Russia!

I am the only one to sing to you

I have fed with berries and mint

the sadness of my beast's poems

Let the night bring the moon's pitcher

Draw up the milk of the birch grove!

Looks like the church near by

Wants to strangle someone with the hands of its crosses!

Something sinister walks the hills,

Drips thief's spite into our garden

But I myself am a bandit and a cad

And by blood — a horse thief

Who ever saw how boil in the night

Legions of the bird-cherry trees?

I was born to the night in the blue roads

To stalk the dark with my knives

Oh, The yellow bush of my head has withered

I got sucked into the poetry prison

Sentenced to turn the grindstones of the verse

In penal servitude of feelings

But don't fret, crazy wind,

Keep spitting leaves in the meadows

The label "poet" won't erase me,

Even in my songs, I am, like you, a hooligan.

 Serguei  Iessenin

(1921, translated from Russian by Alec Vagapov)