YEVTUSHENKO, Yevgeny
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight
it goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
Do the Russians Want War?
O, do the Russians long for war?
ask of the stillness evermore,
ask of the field, or ask the breeze,
and ask the birch and poplar trees.
Ask of the soldiers who now lie
beneath the birch trees and the sky,
and let their sons tell you once more
whether the Russians long,
whether the Russians long,
whether the Russians long for war.
Not only at their country’s call
did Russian soldiers fight and fall;
they died that men from ev’ry shore
might live without the fear of war.
Ask those who fought, and those erased,
ask those who at the Elbe you embraced.
These monuments are only for
to show if Russians long,
to show if Russians long,
to show if Russians long for war.
Yes, we can fight when fight we must;
be we don’t wish to breathe the dust
of soldiers brave from ev’ry clime
who give up life before their time.
Ask of the women in our life,
ask of our mothers –ask my wife–,
and you will never wonder more
whether the Russians long,
whether the Russians long,
whether the Russians long for war.
Their answer rises loud and clear
for all men, ev’rywhere, to hear.
The message now is as before:
the Russians do not long,
the Russians do not long,
the Russians do not long for war.
Babi Yar
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Now I seem to be
a Jew.
Here I plod through ancient Egypt.
Here I perish crucified on the cross,
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.
I seem to be
Dreyfus.
The Philistine
is both informer and judge.
I am behind bars.
Beset on every side.
Hounded,
spat on,
slandered.
Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace
stick their parasols into my face.
I seem to be then
a young boy in Byelostok.
Blood runs, spilling over the floors.
The barroom rabble-rousers
give off a stench of vodka and onion.
A boot kicks me aside, helpless.
In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.
While they jeer and shout,
'Beat the Yids. Save Russia!'
Some grain-marketer beats up my mother.
O my Russian people!
I know
you
are international to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land.
How vile these antisemites—
without a qualm
they pompously called themselves
the Union of the Russian People!
I seem to be
Anne Frank
transparent
as a branch in April.
And I love.
And have no need of phrases.
My need
is that we gaze into each other.
How little we can see
or smell!
We are denied the leaves,
we are denied the sky.
Yet we can do so much—
tenderly
embrace each other in a darkened room.
They're coming here?
Be not afraid. Those are the booming
sounds of spring:
spring is coming here.
Come then to me.
Quick, give me your lips.
Are they smashing down the door?
No, it's the ice breaking . . .
The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.
The trees look ominous,
like judges.
Here all things scream silently,
and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
turning grey.
And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The 'Internationale,' let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried for ever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage, all antisemites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!