Bulat Okudjava

When I am besieged with despair and reprove,
Because can’t stop fatal disaster,    
I enter a blue trolley bus at his move – 
That’s here by chance and the last one.

Oh, bus of midnight, speed along sleeping streets,
Fill them with your endless rotation
To pick up all people whose lives, like poor ships,
Were wrecked by the fatal occasions. 

Oh, bus of midnight, open your noiseless doors,
I know: in changeable darkness, 
Your passengers, silent, - the sailors of yours – 
Come always to help in unluckiness.

With them I’d leave often my woes behind,
I used to touch them with my shoulders,
Imagine, how much of the goodness and kind – 
In silence which over them hovers.          

Our bus sails through Moscow, sunk in midnight, 
Like rivers – it loses its fires,
This pain-starling, striking my whiskeys inside, -
It slowly tires – it tires.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, May, 2001