WHY I DON'T ESCAPE ABROAD Poem by Paul-Eerik Rummo

1.
To love (I mean: to be able
to be weak and wholly wholly
indifferent, whatever comes),
in this way, one can love and write poems
anywhere after all and after all
one cannot live on it anywhere.

2.
One cannot always be weak
and be dragged along by the animal in oneself
that writes poems, and sometimes
it also takes a long rest and sometimes love slips
from one's hands,
and you are in situations that make you clever, bold,
cruel, boringly clever, boringly bold —
like perhaps anywhere else? I don't know.

3.
A half-breed stands,
from one side a Swede, from the other a gipsy,
a bit of Finno-Ugrian and Ingrian, Danish and the Polish blue,
a bit of the Low German nobleness, and in the last annual rings, Russian,
mixed with limping generations from remote corners, incests, after all, fallen
to the earth to the very last, only
the tongue still bleeding slightly, only the tongue still
more or less safe and old, only the tongue still moving, the man
stands, the man stands, a half-breed stands,
the questionable, quite questionable
follower of tree-planters and navigators
(‘hide liberty!,' hide it, take it to the forest and wrap it in moss,
take it along to the sea) — yet
from whom has come this, from whom has remained,
from whom has remained this one who stands here,
Kalevipoeg, the lost one, his arms and his legs wounded
because of his own foolishness, airplanes above his head
crashing, he tries to meditate in his Finno-Ugrian manner,
the forest rare, the sea closed, the border
closed, he stands
and occasionally jokes to spectators in a foreign language, he stands
among his junipers and gothic towers
that no other place in the world has,
among junipers that grow exactly as high as the throat, and gothic towers
with which he has no more to do than with some minarets.

4.
What after all does it mean ‘to escape'?
By God, indeed, why not,
if one cannot live normally
and if no one needs you here?
Fear and estrangement, fear and estrangement,
the fear of hunger, and estrangement
from managing it, whatever comes,
where ever one happens to be.

5.
And one can love and write poems
anywhere after all and after all
one cannot live on it anywhere.

Translated by Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix