In a sometime relining of note lines
Rails, their blueness perilous to eye,
Are luxuriating on the linens
As do those that on the bed sheets lie!

Pushkin's: How many, what is chasing them,
To where! (It fled - no more they sing!)
Here they all are evermore departing,
Here they're sobering and lingering.

Here they stay. Pain like a note
Towering... Above love all
Towering... Like petrified Lot’s wife
Into cemetery stones stiffed the poles...

O the hour, when sheets have been spread out
By despair like matchmakers - Yours! And
Sappho that has lost her voice completely
Like the poorest seamstress cries in pain.

Cry of placability! Cry of a swamp
Heron, cry of waterweed... I deem
Linens of a railroad being cut,
Like by scissors, by a loud scream.

O the red unnecessary spot,
Flow apart as an unneeded dawn!
The young maidens, one after the next,
Onto such a linen ever yearn.

By Marina Tsvetayeva
Translated from Russian by Ilya Shambat https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambat

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)