I have studied the Science of departures, <br />in night’s sorrows, when a woman’s hair falls down. <br />The oxen chew, there’s the waiting, pure, <br />in the last hours of vigil in the town, <br />and I reverence night’s ritual cock-crowing, <br />when reddened eyes lift sorrow’s load and choose <br />to stare at distance, and a woman’s crying <br />is mingled with the singing of the Muse. <br /> <br />Who knows, when the word ‘departure’ is spoken <br /> what kind of separation is at hand, <br /> or of what that cock-crow is a token, <br /> when a fire on the Acropolis lights the ground, <br /> and why at the dawning of a new life, <br /> when the ox chews lazily in its stall, <br /> the cock, the herald of the new life, <br /> flaps his wings on the city wall? <br /> <br /> I like the monotony of spinning, <br /> the shuttle moves to and fro, <br /> the spindle hums. Look, barefoot Delia’s running <br /> to meet you, like swansdown on the road! <br /> How threadbare the language of joy’s game, <br /> how meagre the foundation of our life! <br /> Everything was, and is repeated again: <br /> it’s the flash of recognition brings delight. <br /> <br /> So be it: on a dish of clean earthenware, <br /> like a flattened squirrel’s pelt, a shape, <br /> forms a small, transparent figure, where <br /> a girl’s face bends to gaze at the wax’s fate. <br /> Not for us to prophesy, Erebus, Brother of Night: <br /> Wax is for women: Bronze is for men. <br /> Our fate is only given in fight, <br /> to die by divination is given to them.<br /><br />Osip Emilevich Mandelstam<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tristia-2/
