A poem by Alexander Block – Alexandre Block – Alexandr Blok – Александр Блок
(1880-1921)
The restaurants on hot spring evenings
Lie under a dense and savage air.
Foul drafts and hoots from dunken revelers
Contaminate the thoroughfare.
Above the dusty lanes of suburbia
Above the tedium of bungalows
A pretzel sign begilds a bakery
And children screech fortissimo.
And every evening beyond the barriers
Gentlemen of practiced wit and charm
Go strolling beside the drainage ditches —
A tilted derby and a lady at the arm.
The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water
A woman’s shriek assaults the ear
While above, in the sky, inured to everything,
The moon looks on with a mindless leer.
And every evening my one companion
Sits here, reflected in my glass.
Like me, he has drunk of bitter mysteries.
Like me, he is broken, dulled, downcast.
The sleepy lackeys stand beside tables
Waiting for the night to pass
And tipplers with the eyes of rabbits
Cry out: “In vino veritas!”
And every evening (or am I imagining?)
Exactly at the appointed time
A girl’s slim figure, silk raimented,
Glides past the window’s mist and grime.
And slowly passing throught the revelers,
Unaccompanied, always alone,
Exuding mists and secret fragrances,
She sits at the table that is her own.
Something ancient, something legendary
Surrounds her presence in the room,
Her narrow hand, her silk, her bracelets,
Her hat, the rings, the ostrich plume.
Entranced by her presence, near and enigmatic,
I gaze through the dark of her lowered veil
And I behold an enchanted shoreline
And enchanted distances, far and pale.
I am made a guardian of the higher mysteries,
Someone’s sun is entrusted to my control.
Tart wine has pierced the last convolution
of my labyrinthine soul.
And now the drooping plumes of ostriches
Asway in my brain droop slowly lower
And two eyes, limpid, blue, and fathomless
Are blooming on a distant shore.
Inside my soul a treasure is buried.
The key is mine and only mine.
How right you are, you drunken monster!
I know: the truth is in the wine.
A few random poems:
- Sonnet # 17 by Luis A. Estable
- mine danse macabre doppelganger by matthew scott harris
- Waking in the Blue by Robert Lowell
- A Girl Sang a Song poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- I know The Music (unfinished) by Wilfred Owen
- When I heard at the Close of the Day. by Walt Whitman
- Sonnet 74: But be contented when that fell arrest by William Shakespeare
- Виктор Гончаров – Прощайте, спасибо
- Вера Павлова – Время бежит на время
- Михаил Лермонтов – Юнкерская молитва
- Юрий Коринец – Не кажется ли вам
- A child said, What is the grass by Walt Whitman
- All These I Loved by Rabindranath Tagore
- Riposte to the Bard: Sonnet 130 remade in my lady’s image by Neil Outar
- Ancient Sins by Satish Verma
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Spring Rain by Sara Teasdale
- Sleepless by Sara Teasdale
- On A March Day by Sara Teasdale
- Oh You Are Coming by Sara Teasdale
- My Heart Is Heavy by Sara Teasdale
- Love And Death by Sara Teasdale
- Longing by Sara Teasdale
- Like Barley Bending by Sara Teasdale
- Let It Be Forgotten by Sara Teasdale
- Jewels by Sara Teasdale
- It Will Not Change by Sara Teasdale
- It Is Not A Word by Sara Teasdale
- In The End by Sara Teasdale
- If Death Is Kind by Sara Teasdale
- I Thought Of You by Sara Teasdale
- I Remembered by Sara Teasdale
- I Have Loved Hours At Sea by Sara Teasdale
- Houses Of Dreams by Sara Teasdale
- Guenevere by Sara Teasdale
- Gray Eyes by Sara Teasdale
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
Alexander Blok (1880-1921), also Block, was a Russian poet, writer, publicist, playwright, translator and literary critic. A classic of Russian literature.