shame scorches my cheeks
like a flat iron.
Shame, how we hold our tongues,
or hem and haw.
I am ashamed
of some of my poems.
Lies on fat faces
should lie hidden in trousers.
But what of the shame
when the king of a country
pauses before taking off a shoe
and wonders,
"Which foot
did I wash yesterday?"
And now - it's scandalous–
all the newspapers in Greece
look alike.
Vietnam becomes a pawn.
We lie and lie.
And what if we do eat fish
with a fork instead of a knife,
or eat
while others starve?
Oh, you intelligentsia,
you are caught in the toughening tissue of your lies,
reading Herzen
while stripping, bare-ass, for the lash.
Aronou, Akhmadulina, and Voznesensky translated by Joseph
Langland (with Tamas Aczel and Lazlo Tikos). These poems
will appear in
Poems From the Russi:m Underground
to be
published in the fall by Harper
&
Row.
