This Cruel Age has deflected me.

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.

Sweet to me was not the voice of man, But the wind's voice was understood by me. The burdocks and the nettles fed my soul, But I loved the silver willow best of all.

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

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.

I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

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.