You thought I was that type: that you could forget me, and that I'd plead and weep and throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare, or that I'd ask the sorcerers for some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift: my precious perfumed handkerchief. Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul vicarious tears or a single glance. And I swear to you by the garden of the angels, I swear by the miracle-working ikon, and by the fire and smoke of our nights: I will never come back to you.

Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.

We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.