All creatures touched to life, clutched
By life, are the beings they must be and bear.
Mindlight, spinelight, and somewhere, nowhere,
The dark wave…•
My animal, my age, ravenous in your cage,
What flute might bend the bars, bind the gnarled
Knees of days, and bring forth a world
Of newness, world trued to music—
A lullaby for human grief,
Of human grief,
While the adder breathes in time in the grass.•
Wave after wave of grave aboriginal green,
And then, buds plumped to the point of bursting,
And then, again, all the soft detonations of simple spring…But not for you, my beautiful, my pitiful,
My necrotic, psychotic age.
More cruel for the weakness that taunts you,
More crippled for the supple animal that haunts you,
You stagger on,
Staring back at the way you’ve taken:
Mad tracks in a land called Gone.
—Osip Mandelstam (1923), translated by Christian Wiman