To An Artist Poem by Vic Postnikov

You should be all-understanding,
flexible, unsteady, changing,
as a running ocean wave,
unfastidious and suave, –
welcome all that comes to pass,
leaning, touching, encompass
whether you accept or not.

Be impassive, apathetic,
all-departing, anaesthetic
as a running ocean wave,
have no shelter and no trace, —
daytime, nighttime, dawn you see
every time in different place,
with the only dream in mind:
To the sea, the sea, the sea!

- Nikolai Minsky,1905
Trans. by V.Postnikov,2006