Vasily Kulemin

D’you ever know how cried the blue?
How the forests lifted up their banner?
How the blue tit’s proud speeches flew
And sat together on the white of paper?

And speaking nothing, morose and scorn,
They sit together, silent, till the instant
When it will come – their first long-waited dawn –
And change the worlds, around you and distant.

And it will turn all by the special ways,
And you’ll abstractly see the world around,
Where suddenly revives the doomed to ground,
And dies that one in prime of one’s heydays.  


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, August, 2001