Randall Jarrell: Все стихи поэта

Все стихи Оригиналы Переводы

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Mail Call

The letters always just evade the hand

One skates like a stone into a beam, falls like a bird.

Surely the past from which the letters rise

Is waiting in the future, past the graves?

The soldiers are all haunted by their lives.

Their claims upon their kind are paid in paper

That established a presence, like a smell.

In letters and in dreams they see the world.

by Randall Jarrell

The Elementary Scene

Looking back in my mind I can see

The white sun like a tin plate

Over the wooden turning of the weeds;

The street jerking —a wet swing—

To end by the wall the children sang.

The thin grass by the girls' door,

Trodden on, straggling, yellow and rotten,

by Randall Jarrell

Gunner

Did they send me away from my cat and my wife

To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,

To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?

Did I nod in the flies of the schools?

And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,

The blood froze over my splints like a scab —

Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret,

Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death?

by Randall Jarrell

The Olive Garden

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

He went up under the gray leaves

All gray and lost in the olive lands

And laid his forehead, gray with dust,

Deep in the dustiness of his hot hands.

After everything this. And this was the end.

— Now I must go, as I am going blind.

And why is it Thy will that I must say

by Randall Jarrell

The Black Swan

When the swans turned my sister into a swan

I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:

The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,

A swan's red beak; and the beak would open

And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.

Out on the lake, a girl would laugh.

"Sister, here is your porridge, sister,"

I would call; and the reeds would whisper,

by Randall Jarrell

A Sick Child

The postman comes when I am still in bed.

"Postman, what do you have for me today?"

I say to him. (But really I'm in bed.)

Then he says - what shall I have him say?

"This letter says that you are president

Of - this word here; it's a republic."

Tell them I can't answer right away.

"It's your duty." No, I'd rather just be sick.

by Randall Jarrell

The Refugees

In the shabby train no seat is vacant.

The child in the ripped mask

Sprawls undisturbed in the waste

Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant?

They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed

That they were willing to trade for this?

The dried blood sparkles along the mask

Of the child who yesterday possessed

Randall Jarrell

The Breath Of Night

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling

In the ferns by the rotten oak

Stare over a marsh and a meadow

To the farm's white wisp of smoke.

A spark burns, high in heaven.

Deer thread the blossoming rows

Of the old orchard, rabbits

Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows

by Randall Jarrell

Cinderella

Her imaginary playmate was a grown-up

In sea-coal satin. The flame-blue glances,

The wings gauzy as the membrane that the ashes

Draw over an old ember —as the mother

In a jug of cider— were a comfort to her.

They sat by the fire and told each other stories.

"What men want…" said the godmother softly—

by Randall Jarrell

A Country Life

A bird that I don't know,

Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,

Looks sideways out into the wheat

The wind waves under the waves of heat.

The field is yellow as egg-bread dough

Except where (just as though they'd let

It live for looks) a locust billows

In leaf-green and shade-violet,

by Randall Jarrell

Eighth Air Force

If, in an odd angle of the hutment,

A puppy laps the water from a can

Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving

Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man

Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

The other murderers troop in yawning;

Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one

Lies counting missions, lies there sweating

by Randall Jarrell

Losses

It was not dying: everybody died.

It was not dying: we had died before

In the routine crashes— and our fields

Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,

And the rates rose, all because of us.

We died on the wrong page of the almanac,

Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;

Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,

by Randall Jarrell