The Reply

Dear old lady, live on as you are living. Tenderly in my heart I hold your love, your memory. But only you, perhaps, can understand nothing of my life, my purposes. You have winter now, and on these moonlit nights, I know, you are not alone in thinking that someone is swaying the cherry tree and spreads snow at the window. Flesh of my flesh! Well, how can you sleep in a blizzard ? It roars so woebegone, so long drawn out in the chimney. You'd like to go to sleep, but you see not a pillow, but a narrow grave, in which you are being buried. Like a thousand snuffling demons it screams and wails - riff-raff blizzard! and the snow falls like flocks of birds, and there is neither wife nor friend beyond the grave. I love the spring, most of all, I love the ravine, with the striving brook, where every splinter's like a ship - such spaciousness the eye cannot fathom. But the Spring I love I call the great Revolution. Only for her do I suffer and scandalize, only her do I wait for, and invoke. But this filth - this cold cold planet! Why shouldn't it burn, burn at the Lenin sun! This is why I started my rowdying, started drinking, acting up, with the sick soul of a poet. But the time will come, sweet old lady, the longed for hour will strike! we did not take up arms for nothing, this one the machine-gun, this one the pen. Forget about money, then, forget everything. What disaster!? Is this you? Is it? You see, I'm not a cow, a horse, a sheep to be led out of its stall. I will leave myself when the hour comes round, when we must burn about the planet, and, returning, then I'll buy you that shawl, and buy those things for Dad. Meanwhile, the storm howls on, like a thousand snuffling demons sings and screams - riff-raff blizzard! and the snow falls like flocks of birds, and there is neither wife nor friend beyond the grave.