I
Oh, storm clouds, storm clouds from the German lands! It’s you who caused such a din: you who gave the River Dnipro a hetman’s mace. The Dnipro twisted it this way and that, and, for a long time, admired it. This is how we’ll shake the Hetmanate! A wondrous dream has been realized! – The worker laughed at first, and then became troubled...
They’ve made a throne, offered a mass of supplication, and did all
manner of things. Dnipro, of course, danced a hopak. A hundred hundreds of German dogs, and just as many from the Don, sat in epaulettes around the throne and began to snarl at people. And the all-Russian ideas began to smell like relics. At first people endured, and then...
Oh, storm clouds, storm clouds from the German lands!
1918
II
“The Dnipro is a bandit.” You can find everything in this phrase. Foreign oppression, and hate, our own feebleness, and despair.
It’s a May that’s not like May. The summer has not gotten its fill of sleep, and autumn is here already.
How can it be: are the people who took off the rusted shackles struck with rust as if with an illness? How can it be: has the lofty spirit squandered itself in public and degenerated? Is it not the spirit of Siberia above us? Have we not caught sight of the tsarist biers? Ah! From the White Sea do I sense the incense of the Solovetsky Monastery? Chimes and obscenities commingled in it, banditry and freedom. And Ivan the IVth the Terrible, having impaled the leg of a smelly dog with an iron staff, stands, and listens, and fingers his rosary beads...
1919 During the time of Denikin
III
With blue tears the lake cries profusely. Above it – the sky: “don’t
cry!” – it says, but it can not stop its sobbing: cloud after cloud tears the soulapart. Cloud after cloud. On the shore – geese. Like snow. Geese – “a snowy fluttering” – I say. “why don’t you stop the wind?..” A garden stands below and rehearses the song of autumn. The wind runs up to the walnut trees – the walnuts drop their yellowed notes, not knowing how to sing; the wind rushes to the acacias – but the acacias are already rushing too swiftly. The weeds cry out: and how about me? and me? But the wind grew angry: you’ve all forgotten how to sing! And already it’s beyond the village, beyond the village of Lystopadove, 27 and the mills have the last say –“into a circle! into a circle!” And the weeds call after it: “my dear, what about me?”
With blue tears the lake cries profusely. And only from time to time a wave from the opposite direction will sprinkle it with sand. With the red one? – Along the deep blue...
Geese on the shore.
1920 With the Stetsenko Chorus on tour in Ukraine.
The village of Zlatopil, on a hill