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March
Sunlight scorches to a seven-fold swelter,
Frenzied life surges from the ravine,
And a thousand labors seethe and prosper
In the hands of strapping milkmaid Spring.
The last snow's traces waste away and sicken
In enfeebled, livid, branching veins,
But life-force fumes and vapors in the cowshed
And health comes bursting from the hayfork tines.
Nights and days and nights - endless succession,
Drubbing droplets of the midday rains,
Trickle of an icicle's anemia,
Bubbling chatter of unsleeping streams!
Doors stand open - stable, cowshed. Pigeons
Pick at oats among the snow. Out there
Breathes the source and author of this life force -
The dung heap with its breath of space and air.
Boris Pasternak
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"White Night"
Amid visions of eras long past
I see a house in the Petersburg quarter,
And the daughter of steppe-dwelling gentlefolk,
Born in Kursk and now auditing courses.
You're attractive, with many admirers.
And in the pale Petersburg night
The two of us sit at your window
Peering down at the town from on high.
The streetlamps - like moths made of gauze -
Are touched with the morning's first shivers,
And all that I softly recount
Bears the mark of that sleeping far distance.
And the two of us sit in the thrall
Of a shared timid faith in some secret -
Like the outspreading Petersburg scene
Beyond the expanse of the Neva.
And now, on that white night in spring,
In the distance of faraway forests
Nightingales flood each wooded reach
With the peals of their thunderous praises.
The lunatic trillings unfurl,
And the voice of that delicate songster
Awakes a commotion and thrill
In the depths of enraptured forests.
And the night steals away to those places,
Past the fence, like a barefooted vagrant;
In its wake, from the eavesdropping sill
Hangs the trail of our half-heard exchanges.
In those echoes of overheard dialogue,
Across the lath fencing and gardens
The boughs of the apple and cherry
Are decked in their white blossom garments.
And into the street from the orchard
The trees' pallid phantoms come drifting,
As if bidding farewell to the white
Night, and to and all it witnessed.
