Or the blind Yelabuga comes!"
It
is
ready now!
It's coming!
It
is
stumbling! Quickly, quickly!
And I bring down my boot with its nails
hard on its stretching fingers
and hard on its throat, and keep
the weight of my heel to its tip.
I swear by the children its blood
will burn my feet like green poison,
and I'll throw to this bottomless earth
the ripe green egg of its tail.
But not one word of that porch
where Marina, homeless, died!
And I swear, though our Yelabuga
should fix me with yellow eyes
and swear in the dark, in the stench
of swamps, by the toad of spring,
that it will kill me. I swear!
Andrei Voznesenskv
SHAME
They have cut out our sense of shame
like an appendix.
We are doomed, shameless.
We are overcoming death, but who knows how
to blush for life?
These are the fibrillose membranes of our cheeks,
the soul's sense of touch,
a gift from God,
not ears and eyes.
When I go down
into the filthy lives of men
