...and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin
And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.
-Anna Akhamatova, "Willow" (
Transl by Jennifer Reeser)
Expresses very well what I feel about what has happened to my (our) country.
ReplyDeleteI gaze now in perpetual wonderment
And sorrow at the jagged, rotting stump
Of the once-vital, arcing grandeur
Of the once-dear and familiar tree
That gave me shade and comfort,
While all around me weeds, thorns
And strange, stunted saplings
Litter the parched stony soil
Beneath a pitiless, gray wintery sky.
Apt. Very apt.
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