“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”

“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”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We live without feeling the country beneath our feet, our words are inaudible from ten steps away. Any conversation, however brief, gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man. His greasy fingers are thick as worms, his words weighty hammers slamming their target. His cockroach moustache seems to snicker, and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam. Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains, he toys with the favors of such homunculi. One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps; he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn. Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes, he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead, a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye. Every execution is a carnival that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.”

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