Читать книгу Requiem and Poem without a Hero - Anna Akhmatova - Страница 7

Poem in a Strange Language

Starlings, the burnable stages of stars,

Fall back to earth, lightly. And stars,

Propulsars of angels, die in a swift burn.

And half the angels have fallen below the horizon.

And, falling like alpha particles,

Re-charge the drowned woman Floating in the bitter lake,

Her hair gold as their blood, her face amazed.

She is Lot’s wife, her naked body

Sustained by the salt she has loosened from,

And as her eyes open, grain

Turns green-golden on the black earth of Sodom.

I enter your poem, Mandelstam, yours, Anna

Akhmatova, as I enter my love—

Without understanding anything

Except its beauty and law.

And the way its cloud of small

Movements lifts lightly the fruit

Of a painful harvest and moves

With singing vowels away from death.

D. M. Thomas