I dearly, dearly long to be with you,
to sit and chat with you, drink tea with you.
You’d do the talking – I would be all ears;
your voice grows ever dearer with the years.
You, too, knew grief and fury and disdain;
you, too, died slowly, slowly and in pain.
by Георгий Владимирович Иванов (Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov)
(1958)
by Robert Chandler
Horizontal dancing
to the sound
of the spinning earth –
vulnerable as
a frantic fly
yet ready to burst
from the house’s pod.
With you, we dicover
senses
that logic’s
data banks
had tried to process
into the pure expression.
Paper flaps like giant ferns
and there is a cave
in the corner of the room.
It is possible
to pick up
shards of shadows
to make into tools.
And when your hunger-screams
fly in the primeval forest
they are
half-lizard, half-bird.
by Mike Jenkins
from Empire of Smoke
I walked without dragging my feet
but felt heavy at heart and frightened;
and I pulled onto my left hand
the glove that belonged to the right.
There seemed to be countless steps,
though I knew there were only three,
and an autumn voice from maples
whispered, ‘Die with me!
I have been undone by a fate
that is cheerless, flighty and cruel.’
I repied, ‘So have I, my dearest –
let me die one death with you…’
The song of a last encounter:
I glanced up at a dark wall:
from the bedroom indifferent candles
glowed yellow… And that was all.
by Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova)
(1911, Tsarkoye Selo)
from Вечер (Evening, 1912)
translation by Robert Chandler
This is an alternative version of same poem translated as Song of the Last Meeting by D. M. Thomas.
In front of the fire
With you, the folk song
Of the wind in the chimney and the sparks’
Embroidery of the soot – eternity
Is here in this small room
In intervals that our love
Widens; and outside
Us is time and the victims
Of time, travellers
To a new Bethlehem, statesmen
And scientists with their hands full
Of the gifts that destroy.
by R. S. Thomas
from H’m (1972)
Rambling At The Bridge Head 