Under a coxcomb of a milky white Isaac has built a graying pigeon cage The crozier irritates the graying quiet Gradations of the air the heart can gauge. There's wandering ghost of century-old requiem Then the grand bearing of the shroud Genessarian darkness in decrepit seine Of week of Lent, before the crowd. Upon warm altars smoke glows And then a priest exudes an orphaned cry A regal man: there is clean snow On the shoulders, and savage porphyry. Sophie's and Peter's Grand Cathedrals that withstood Centuries; warehouses of air and light Grain hangars of the universal good And corn-kilns of New Testament. In the harsh troubled year, not to your side The spirit drags across the steps in peace, The wolf's trail of disaster reaches wide And will not change over the centuries. Free is the slave who once has conquered fear And who beyond all measure kept, through grief, In deep cornbins, in chilly granaries The grain of utter and complete belief. By Osip Mandelshtam Translated from Russian by Ilya Shambat https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambat
