By Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky
I like to watch children dying.
Do you note behind the proboscis sighing,
the vast, vague waves of the laughter’s foam?
But I–
in the reading room of the streets–
have so often leafed through the coffin tome.
Midnight
with drenched fingers was groping
me
and the battered fence,
and the crazy cathedral was galloping
in drops of downpour on the cupola’s bald head.
I have seen Christ flee from an icon
and the mud in tears kiss
the wind-blown fringe of his chiton.
I shout at the bricks,
stabbing the dagger of raving words high
into the pulp of the swollen sky:
‘Sun!
My father!
At least have mercy and don’t torture me!
This, my blood you spilled, flows down this bottom road.
This is my soul,
tatters of a torn cloud
in a burnt out sky
on the rusted cross of the belfry!
Time!
Lame icon-painter,
you at least will gild my countenance
for a freak age to have enshrined!
I am as lonely as the last good eye
of a man on his way to the blind!’