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Something dangerous is beginning:
I am coming late to my own self.
I made an appointment with my thoughts-
the thoughts were snatched from me.
I made an appointment with Faulkner-
but they made me go to a banquet.
I made an appointment with history,
but a grass-widow dragged me into bed.
Worse than barbed wire
are birthday parties, mine and others',
and roasted suckling pigs hold me
like a sprig of parsley between their teeth!
Led away for good
to a life absolutely not my own,
everything that I eat, eats me,
everything that I drink, drinks me.
I made an appointment with myself,
but they invite me to feast on my own spareribs.
I am garlanded from all sides
not by strings of bagels, but by the holes of bagels,
and I look like an anthology of zeros.
Life gets broken into hundreds of lifelets,
that exhaust and execute me.
In order to get through to myself
I had to smash my body against others',
and my fragments, my smithereens,
are trampled by the roaring crowd.
I am trying to glue myself together,
but my arms are still severed.
I'd write with my left leg,
but both the left and the right
have run off, in different directions.
I don't know- where is my body?
And soul? Did it really fly off,
without a murmured 'good-bye! '?
How do I break through to a faraway namesake,
waiting for me in the cold somewhere?
I've forgotten under which clock
I am waiting for myself.
For those who don't know who they are,
time does not exist.
No one is under the clock.
On the clock there is nothing.
I am late for my appointment
with me. There is no one.
Nothing but cigarette butts.
Only one flicker-
A lonely, dying, spark...
1985
Translated by Albert C. Todd
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
| Submitted Date |
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Friday, August 17, 2007 |
| Submitted Date |
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Tuesday, March 29, 2011 |
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