Osip Mandelstam

Extract from Tristia

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I have studied the Science of departures, in night’s sorrows, when a woman’s hair falls down. The oxen chew, there’s the waiting, pure, in the last hours of vigil in the town, and I reverence night’s ritual cock-crowing, when reddened eyes lift sorrow’s load and choose to stare at distance, and a woman’s crying is mingled with the singing of the Muse. Who knows, when the word ‘departure’ is spoken what kind of separation is at hand, or of what that cock-crow is a token, when a fire on the Acropolis lights the ground, and why at the dawning of a new life, when the ox chews lazily in its stall, the cock, the herald of the new life, flaps his wings on the city wall? I like the monotony of spinning, the shuttle moves to and fro, the spindle hums. Look, barefoot Delia’s running to meet you, like swansdown on the road! How threadbare the language of joy’s game, how meagre the foundation of our life! Everything was, and is repeated again: it’s the flash of recognition brings delight. So be it: on a dish of clean earthenware, like a flattened squirrel’s pelt, a shape, forms a small, transparent figure, where a girl’s face bends to gaze at the wax’s fate. Not for us to prophesy, Erebus, Brother of Night: Wax is for women: Bronze is for men. Our fate is only given in fight, to die by divination is given to them. Osip Mandelstam Russian poet 1891-1938