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)
