Three Poems - Sergei Yesenin
A Song About Bread
Here it is, the harsh brutality,
The full meaning of human suffering!
The sickle cuts the heavy ears of wheat
The way they slit throats of swans.
Since time immemorial, our field
Has known the morning shudder of August.
Straw is tied up in bundles,
Each bundle lies there like a yellow corpse.
Carts, like hearses, carry them
Into the crypt: a barn.
Like a deacon, the driver,
Barking at the mare, heeds the funeral rites.
After that, with care, without anger,
Their heads are laid on the ground
And little bones are pummeled
Out of their thin bodies with chains.
No one ever thinks
That straw is also flesh.
The bones are shoved in the mouth of the cannibal mill
That grinds them with its teeth.
And then, fermenting the dough,
They bake piles of tasty viands...
That’s when the whitish venom enters the jug
Of the stomach to lay eggs of spite.
Condensing all the beatings into a loaf,
Distilling the reapers’ cruelty into redolent brew,
It poisons the millstones of intestines
Of those who eat this straw meat.
And the charlatan, the murderer, and the villain
Whistle like autumn across the entire country...
All because the sickle cuts ears of wheat
The way they slit throats of swans.
<1921>
* * *
I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry.
All will pass like smoke from white apple trees.
Overcome with the gold of wilting,
I won’t be young anymore.
Touched with cold, you will no longer
Beat in the same way, heart,
And the land of birch chintz
Won’t tempt me to gallivant barefoot.
Nomadic spirit! Less and less
You stoke the flame of my lips.
O my lost freshness,
Mayhem of eyes and deluge of feelings!
These days I’m stingier in my desires,
My life—or did I dream you?
I might as well have galloped on a pink steed
On a sonorous early spring morning.
All of us, all of us will perish;
Quietly, copper leaves pour from maples...
Therefore, blessed be, forever,
Everything that’s come to bloom and to die.
<1921>
Letter to My Mother
Are you still alive, my dear old lady?
I’m alive as well. Hello, hello!
Let that ineffable evening light
Keep streaming over your hut.
They write to me that, barely hiding your fear,
You’ve gotten awfully sad over me,
That you often wander the road
In your tattered old-fashioned coat.
In the blue dark of evening,
You often see the same thing:
In a bar fight, someone has stabbed me
In the heart with a Finnish knife.
It’s nothing, my dear! Please calm down.
Just a terrible hallucination.
I’m not so hopeless a drunkard
As to die without seeing you.
I’m as gentle as I was before,
And I only dream of one thing:
To come back from my rebellious anguish
To our squat house.
I will come back when our garden,
White with spring, outstretches its branches.
But this time, don’t wake me up at dawn
The way you used to do eight years ago.
Don’t wake up the old expectations;
Don’t disturb all that didn’t come true—
I’ve endured loss and exhaustion
Far too early in life.
And don’t teach me to pray. Please don’t!
There is no going back to the old.
Only you are my help and my joy.
Only you are my ineffable light.
So forget your anxiety,
Don’t get so awfully sad over me.
Don’t wander the road so often
In your tattered old-fashioned coat.
<1924>