A moon gate in my wall: собрание стихотворений

At midnight, when the pallid moon,
shivering as from cold and pain,
within its bluish aureole
soars upward past your windowpane,

when burnt by the celestial cold

silently floating in the dark
its rays that shimmer in the night
are barely heard above the park,

then, through the stillness and the dream,

in all your grief of long ago,
you will approach your windowsill
and push the panes apart and go

out of the darkness gliding up

a path by human eyes unseen
on which your foot will never slip
nor will you falter or careen.

And in the ringing solitude

with hand outstretched and sleeping eyes
heavy and cumbersome and slow
above the darkness you will rise

until from out the icy space,

the earthly blackness void and still,
some reveller's nocturnal voice
suddenly rises sharp and shrill.

Then, jolted, will the heavens rock

and swim, and lights go out that shone,
and dead onto the stones below
the moon will tumble like a stone.

[1960s]

648. Василий Сумбатов(1893–1977). Гиперборей [304]

Akhmatova, Ivanov, Mandelshtam —
forgotten notebook I have rescued here —
«Hyperboreus» — home for transient verse
of youthful poets in that happy year.

I found it at the bottom of a trunk

among my dusty archives lost retreat.
And forty year — is that not ancient yet?
To have survived so long — not yet a feat?

«October. Notebook Light. Nineteen Thirteen».

Year of the sunset, last bright, carefree year.
For all that followed was not life at all,
but time of reckoning, reprisal, fear.

This notebook — witness of a golden age,

these pages — that escaped the lethal stream!
I open it, I read — my eyes are wet, —
how young the poems, young the poets seem!

And I — how old! How wasted all these years!

How dark ahead what — emptiness behind!
What awesome thought — that not a trace of me
will anyone, in any notebook find!

1 Nov. 1966

649. Василий Сумбатов(1893–1977). Видение [305]

To Mary Vezey