Still the gloom of night around.
Still so early in the world,
The stars are countless in the sky,
And each of them as bright as day,
And if the earth were able to,
It would sleep its way through Easter
To the reading of the psalms.
Still the gloom of night around.
So early an hour in the world,
The square lies like eternity
From the crossroads to the corner,
And the light and warmth of dawn
Are still a millennium away.
The earth’s still bare as bare can be,
With nothing to put on at night
To go and swing the bells outside
And there back up the choristers.
And from Great and Holy Thursday
Right to Holy Saturday,
Water bores the riverbanks
And twines in whirlpools round itself.
And the woods are undressed, uncovered,
And at the service of Christ’s Passion,
Like the ranks of people praying,
Stand trunks of pine trees in a crowd.
And in town, with very little
Space, as at a local meeting,
Trees, stark naked, stand and look
Through the church’s grillwork gates.
And their gaze is filled with terror.
The cause of their alarm is clear.
Gardens are coming through the fence,
The order of the earth is shaken:
It is God they’re burying.
And they see light by the royal doors,
A black pall and a row of candles,
Tear-stained faces—suddenly
The procession of the cross
Comes to meet them with the shroud,
And two birches by the gate
Are forced to step aside for it.
And the procession makes its way
Around the yard and down the walk,
And brings to the chapel from outside
Spring, and springtime conversation,
And air that smacks of blessed bread,
And of spring’s intoxication.
And March squanders its hoard of snow
On cripples crowding by the porch,
As if a man came out to them
Carrying the ark, and opened it,
And gave away all to the very last.
And the singing goes on till dawn,
And, when it has sobbed its fill,
The reading of psalms and the epistle
Reaches more softly from inside
To vacant lots under the lamps.
But at midnight creature and flesh
Fall silent, hearing the springtime rumor
That the moment the weather clears
Death itself may be overcome
By the effort of the Resurrection.
4
I am dreaming of a far-off time,
A house over on the Petersburg Side.
The daughter of a modest steppe landowner,
You’re taking courses, you were born in Kursk.
You’re sweet, you have admirers.
On this white night the two of us,
Having settled on your windowsill,
Are looking down from your skyscraper.
Streetlights like gas butterflies,
Morning touched by a first tremor.
What I am softly telling you
Is so much like the sleeping distance!
We are gripped by the very same
Timid loyalty to the secret
As Petersburg spreading its panorama
Beyond the boundless river Neva.
Far off at the dense confines,
On this white night in the spring,
Nightingales fill the forest’s limits
With their thunderous hymns of glory.
The crazy trilling surges, rolls,
The voice of the little homely bird
Awakens ecstasy and turmoil
In the depths of the enchanted wood.
In those parts, night, the barefoot pilgrim,
Making her way along the fence,
Draws after her from the windowsill
A trail of overheard conversation.
To the echoes of talk heard aloud,
In orchards fenced with wooden palings,
Bending apple and cherry boughs
Clothe themselves in whitish flowers.
And the trees, like white apparitions,
Pour in a crowd out to the road,
Waving as if to bid farewell
To the white night that has seen so much.
5
Sunset’s fires were burning down.
A man on horseback dragged himself
Over a bad road through the pines
To a far-off farmstead in the Urals.
The horse’s spleen was tossed about,
The splashing of its iron shoes
Was echoed in its wake by water
In the sinkholes of the springs.
When the rider dropped the reins
And went on at a walking pace,
The flooding waters spread nearby
With all their roar and rumbling.
Someone laughed, someone wept,
Stone against stone crashed and crumbled,
Tree stumps torn out by the root
Toppled into the whirling pools.
And at sunset’s conflagration,
In the far-off, blackened branches,
Like the tolling of the tocsin,
A nightingale sang furiously.
