Wild Geese
— Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wait for Me
— Konstantin Simonov
Translated by Lubov Yakovleva

Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
But wait with all your might,
Wait when dreariness descends,
With the yellow rains,
Wait when snowdrifts sweep the ground,
Wait during the heat,
Wait when others are given up
And together with the past forgotten.
Wait when from distant places
Letters do not arrive,
Wait when all who’ve waited together
Are already tired of it.

Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
Don’t give your approval
To those who say you should forget,
Insisting they are right.
Even though my son and mother
Believe I’m already gone,
Though my friends get tired of waiting,
Settle by the fire and drink
A bitter cup,
So my soul should rest in peace . . .
Wait. Do not make haste to join them
In their toast to me.

Wait for me, and I’ll come back,
Just to spite all deaths.
Let the ones who did not wait
Say: “It was his luck.”
It’s hard for them to understand,
For those who did not wait,
That in the very heat of fire,
By waiting here for me,
It was you that saved me.
Only you and I will know
How I survived—
It’s just that you knew how to wait
As no other person.

The Enkindled Spring
— D. H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

Everything As In a Good Old-Fashioned Novel
— Andrey Dementyev
To Maya Lugovskaya
Translated by Simon Franklin

Everything as in a good old-fashioned novel.
Colonnaded house, light from a window.
Black limes in blue haze.
Elegaic quietude.

Rustle of crows in drenched clumps of trees.
Leaves float quietly in a pond.
What the hell; I am a complete outsider
In this yellow, forgotten garden.

But, imagine.
Under the leafy canopy
I wander for hours along the fence,
Like an aristocrat, concealing his provenance,
Remembering something.

What is there for me in these columns, these niches!
And I am here as if for the first time,
And my father not one of the has-beens,
But one of those who both were and are.

But with a kind of clinging sadness
The dampness of the columns infiltrates my soul,
And so, in his cultivated backwoods,
Forgotten by people, does Apollo.

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