It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.

I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me . . . and asked me in a whisper . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."

How the miracle of our meeting Shone there and sang, I didn't want to return From there to anywhere. Happiness instead of duty Was bitter delight to me. Not obliged to speak to anyone, I spoke for a long while. Let passions stifle lovers, Demanding answers, We, my dear, are only souls At the limits of the world.

And this tenderness was not like That which a certain poet At the beginning of the century called true And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all— It rang out, like the first waterfall, It crunched like the crust of bluish ice And it prayed with a swanlike voice, And it broke down right before our eyes.

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.