Mind Over Matter. 72 assorted poems in English by a Russian

For nothing but money.
It cannot be helped.

    2007
Deep, very deep in the taiga forest
Where the beautiful fir-tree grows
A squat plain log-built loner’s cottage
Stands in the thick of the grove.
The ski-path meandering endlessly through
The realm of the evergreen muffled with snow
Brings me to the hut not really soon —
I’ve come here to spend time alone.
Cold and tired but happy and hopeful
I stoke up the oven and unpack the victuals.
The sky is starry, the flame is joyful,
Life seems so suddenly simple.

    2001
Don’t talk to me
The way the talk should be,
Talk to me free,
Don’t sing to me,
For all I want from thee
Is just sincerity.
So don’t talk to me
Like they talk on TV,
Don’t quarrel with me
Like they do in the movies,
But do it sincerely,
Do it upfront,
Do it so thoroughly
I am right away stunned;
Don’t do it right,
But do it your way,
Do it at night
And during the day.
Don’t talk to me
The way the talk should be,
Talk to me free.

    2002
Hometown-bound

A long steel rail
That we all have seen
With its maddening steadiness
And its lamp-side sheen
Carries on carrying us
To the places we’ve been
Helping to go back
To the pasts long gone…
Some nice, some lived irreversibly wrong.
People who live there
Live on in our past
Which seems to be bound
To always last.

    2012
The subject can be narrow or broad:
It ranges from ‘lapel’ to ‘Lord’,
It may be quite a panorama
But here’s today’s communication drama:
It’s never deep however broad:
We listen but we soon get bored.
Recurring to computers, TV, books,
Indulging in embellishing our looks,
We shallower soon become,
To coreless, flashy life succumbed.

    2004

Russia-Bound

When Russia was said to have been sold
I wasn’t sold on that:
The heart of this country is inert to gold,
The song is infinitely sad.

    1999
One hundred yards they sleep underneath
The stormy chest of the Barents Sea
In an iron, iron black submarine
Day after day into eternity…
Penned captain-lieutenant, ‘We’re twenty-three’…
…‘we’ll be twenty-three and here we’ll be’…

    2000
I will see a whole world
But everywhere I go
I will see the sky above
Now high and now low
I will breathe the air
Everywhere I go
I will be myself
Whatever I may know.

    1995
That’s Russia

You will never translate it into your own language