“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

“I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.”

“Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.”

“Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.”

“And I walk out of spaceInto an overgrown garden of values,And tear up seeming stabilityAnd self-comprehension of causes.And your, infinity, textbookI read by myself, without people -Leafless, savage medical book,A problem book of gigantic radicals.”

“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”

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