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| From the book Elegies | | (1987-2004) |  |
| The Sycamore Elegy | | To Ivan Zhdanov | The tree, Vanya, that very tree, that sycamore
on an old etching in a book, on the porous cotton-bond paper –
do you recognize it?
Its leaves still sparkle, the branches swallow the height,
but time is up. Wrath has ripened. The word is already in my throat.
*
“Wretched,” I say to myself, “you’ve earned what’s coming to you.
You didn’t take oil with you, you didn’t invest your mind with patience,
and you’ll set off without a torch – you should be ashamed! –
*
to the One who announced about neither a day nor an hour
but about the fact that the sky needed loyalty,
the way a lamp needs oil,
the way thirst needs fruit.
The rest steals in like a thief.”
*
You won’t enter the house of that wedding on the Wednesday of
jubilation.
And, fainting from the foreboding prophecy, you won’t pour
the rich aroma for which you have given
*
everything you had possessed.
You won’t accompany him to the torments,
feeling that a son prefers a father’s respect more
than all hopes and assistance.
And when death has come
not from inside but asking for a command:
It is open,
come in!
And everything that had been ridiculed, debased, and battered before,
that will be left for strangers like a tunic that has not been sewn.
*
And You, mad woman, chose to live. – It’s true, anyone chooses
to live and to watch endlessly as spring comes, birds play,
hatch nestlings, wheat shines gold, the stony Kidron roars…
*
“I asked you, do you remember,” He used to say–
what I’ll give is a different matter, it’s none of your business?
I’m sick – who’d visit me?
I’m thirsty – where’s the cup?
Foxes tend lairs and birds – their nests. I knock – where’s my home?”
*
…With fire
or without it, going off into the distance, a maiden Holy Fool can no
longer be seen in the darkness1.
I see inside in the darkness, a tree killed by miraculous wrath,
but I do not see one who would say to it: “It serves you right!”
*
and one who would run out like a madman
from drawn-out fruitless hope, from faithless wearisome labor
out of a life of freedom!
no matter where
before the stave strikes the ground with the words: Where to!
*
What should we do, my friend, what to do, brother, which
oblivion will come? Or, like a fakir,
from beneath its tattered cape will it pull out a flock of birds, an emerald,
a golden cloth?
O, all these things are better inside where there are none of them,
When they aren’t expected, they are better than peace.
*
One who asks – at some point will receive it.
One who asks for forgiveness –
at some point will be forgiven. One who cannot lift his face in shame
is loved more than others. His heart will be embraced by his loss,
the way a bridegroom or a father is hugged after long separation.
Slava I. Yastremski and Michel Naydan
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| | 1 Holy Fool: weak-minded people were considered to be prophets in Medieval Russia. Since they “did not have mind of their own”, whatever they said was perceived as the word of God. | |
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|  | | The Sycamore Elegy |
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