I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.

Take from my palms, to soothe your heart, a little honey, a little sun, in obedience to Persephone's bees. You can't untie a boat that was never moored, nor hear a shadow in its furs, nor move through thick life without fear. For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive. Deep in the transparent night they're still humming, at home in the dark wood on the mountain, in the mint and lungwort and the past. But lay to your heart my rough gift, this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees that once made a sun out of honey.

Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips, And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew, And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss, Acquire their forms before we do

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.