Boris Pasternak

The distance is sudden and strangest,
The dawn’s in the fresh bruises’ lace --                                    
Like marks of unhealed painful scratches,
Like blood on the thin reaper’s legs.

The gashes of sky are the portents
Of winds and of rains that will gust, 
The air of the swamps smells of water,
It smells of wet iron and rust.

In forests, on roads, on grounds
Of hamlets and villages, wealth,  
Such dire zigzags in the clouds,
Presage the bad weather to earth.

But when o’er the capital, mighty,
The edge of the sky is so red,
Some things will occur to the country,
A tempest will hammer the land.    

Blok saw this glum net in skies' deserts.
He was by the heights forewarned  
Of that Thunderstorm, that Bad Weather,
Great Tempest, The Mighty Cyclone.

He looked for that storm, that intrusion,
His life was upset by its flames,
His fright, thirst for its resolution
Were laid in his life and his verse.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, May, 2001