From early dawn the thirtieth of April <br />Is given up to children of the town, <br />And caught in trying on the festive necklace, <br />By dusk it only just is settling down. <br /> <br />Like heaps of squashy berries under muslin <br />The town emerges out of crimson gauze. <br />Along the streets the boulevards are dragging <br />Their twilight with them, like a rank of dwarves. <br /> <br />The evening world is always eve and blossom, <br />But this one with a sprouting of its own <br />From May-day anniversaries will flower <br />One day into a commune fully blown. <br /> <br />For long it will remain a day of shifting, <br />Pre-festive cleaning, fanciful decor, <br />As once it used to be with Whitsun birches <br />Or pan-Athenian fires long before. <br /> <br />Just so they will go on, conveying actors <br />To their assembly points; beat sand; just so <br />Pull up towards illuminated ledges <br />The plywood boards, the crimson calico. <br /> <br />Just so in threes the sailors briskly walking <br />Will skirt the grass in gardens and in parks, <br />The moon at nightfall sink into the pavements <br />Like a dead city or a burnt-out hearth. <br /> <br />But with each year more splendid and more spreading <br />The taut beginning of the rose will bloom, <br />More clearly grow in health and sense of honour, <br />Sincerity more visibly will loom. <br /> <br />The living folksongs, customs and traditions <br />Will ever spreading, many-petalled lay <br />Their scent on fields and industries and meadows <br />From early buddings on the first of May, <br /> <br />Until the full fermented risen spirit <br />Of ripened years will shoot up, like the smell <br />Of humid centifolia. It will have to <br />Reveal itself, it cannot help but tell.<br /><br />Boris Pasternak<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/from-early-dawn-the-thirtieth-of-april/
