Two poems by Evgenii Evtushenko

Evgenii Aleksandrovich Evtushenko, 1933 – 2017, was an extremely talented Russian poet from Siberia of the Soviet period and well beyond who is most famous for his poem “Babii Yar” in which he proclaims his solidarity with the Jews who were slaughtered there by the Nazis and “The Heirs of Stalin” that warns against allowing Stalinists to come back into power after his death.  He was well travelled and a stirring declaimer of his poetry who moved audiences with his performances.

 

1.

Darling child-woman,
still child myself.
Why are you afraid of me?
Don’t be scared.   

Among all these bandits sporting about    
I can’t even win myself.
Our journey has been to lost hours
and lands,
as well as deceptions devised.
But each other imitated perfectly. 
Should we be hopeful?
For what and for whom?

But women are always most hopeful
when abject hopeless.
It’s thoughtless not to deceive them.
their comfort adores self-deception
and misfortune.

 
You slip your marble legs into tight jeans.
You’ll slap a touchy jerk on his hand.
Old men can’t imagine in their nightmares
how lonely young girls can be.
I bless and curse that day
when your Greek profile materialized
before me on desire’s groping beach,
up from the bottom shoals
on a sand sprinkled amphora.
I don’t want you to love me,
or that an avalanche of shy tenderness
should brush an accidental thigh  
it would be a sin to touch –                                                                
even slightly.

But full of desperate childhood,
risking deception anew,
you threaten in jest  
as we part for home,
“I won’t stop loving you –
not a chance!”     
Someday I’d like to see you
when you don’t crave or need me –
better without your husband –
classic blue baby carriage handmaiden,
sun and moon nymph to your child,
forgetting all the dirt and
disgust of gossip,
I will step quietly aside                                 
And grant a happy but bitter smile.     

                                                                                               
I can’t give what your love will demure.
Please receive it anyway you prefer.

You grace lush sun reaped tides.
There’s no way silver beach sands can be mine.

Nor can you mingle mine with yours.
When I was young and you weren’t,
because you weren’t around at all,
looming in the fog like a solstice ray,
as my first love’s eternal face
your petaled lips can’t grow, opened too late.

“I don’t love you.” I can’t tell that lie.
But three other words lurk inside me like squid on ice.
I have no strength for them and no right.
Happy to see you – bites my tongue in half.

But you, like the future, suddenly kiss me,
untamed terror clinging to my cheek
with your girl’s taut lips of dawn not flared.
Only melancholy your love depends on

2.     

I don’t like my future’s memorial,

the one shoved somewhere in a third-world country,
where puppets bang their fists like a super-power,
hide their ragged poverty secretly in their pockets      
where bananas of bent and rotten rockets
are our only fruit.  No Antonov’s apples.

A memorial is not what I need                                       
but my country, after death, given back to me.