“My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.”

“If our enemies take meAnd people stop talking to me,If they confiscate the whole world—The right to breathe, open doors, Affirm that existence shall go onAnd that people, like a judge, shall judge,And if they dare to keep me like an animalAnd fling my food on the floor, I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,But shall write what I am free to write,My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,And in a corner of the ominous darkI shall yoke ten oxen to my voiceAnd move my hand in the darkness like a ploughAnd, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,And in the depths of the unguarded nightThe eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shineAnd a flock of flaming years swoop down,And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.But on this earth (which shall escape decay)There to wake up life and reason will be”

“Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.”

“I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.”

“I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.”

“Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,a little honey, a little sun,in obedience to Persephone's bees.You can't untie a boat that was never moored,nor hear a shadow in its furs,nor move through thick life without fear.For us, all that's left is kissestattered as the little beesthat die when they leave the hive.Deep in the transparent night they're still humming,at home in the dark wood on the mountain,in the mint and lungwort and the past.But lay to your heart my rough gift,this unlovely dry necklace of dead beesthat once made a sun out of honey.― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems (NYRB Classics; 1st edition, August 31, 2004) Originally published 1972”

“I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveler, has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on the hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory.”