My beast, my age, who will try <br /> to look you in the eye, <br /> and weld the vertebrae <br /> of century to century, <br /> with blood? Creating blood <br /> pours out of mortal things: <br /> only the parasitic shudder, <br /> when the new world sings. <br /> <br /> As long as it still has life, <br /> the creature lifts its bone, <br /> and, along the secret line <br /> of the spine, waves foam. <br /> Once more life’s crown, <br /> like a lamb, is sacrificed, <br /> cartilage under the knife - <br /> the age of the new-born. <br /> <br /> To free life from jail, <br /> and begin a new absolute, <br /> the mass of knotted days <br /> must be linked by means of a flute. <br /> With human anguish <br /> the age rocks the wave’s mass, <br /> and the golden measure’s hissed <br /> by a viper in the grass. <br /> <br /> And new buds will swell, intact, <br /> the green shoots engage, <br /> but your spine is cracked <br /> my beautiful, pitiful, age. <br /> And grimacing dumbly, you writhe, <br /> look back, feebly, with cruel jaws, <br />a creature, once supple and lithe, <br /> at the tracks left by your paws.<br /><br />Osip Emilevich Mandelstam<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-age-2/
