"And I was alive" below the blizzard
of the blossoming pear,
I sheltered from the stammering
storm of the cherry tree beneath the cherry tree's
leaf-life and star-shower,
its sap-strength, its primal, invisible
axe-susceptible power
which had nothing to do with
what I had been told was me.
What and where is the joy, the delight
that always takes flight from us
and even our shadows ?
What is being? What is reality? What is right ?
Petals wrinkle and rapture the air,
flurry and float, and I am in
time shrunk to a kernel,
time stretched to the
impossibly, unbearably eternal -
brief sweetness transubstantiating into the glory
of all-encompassing rot.
All is now. All was. All will be and is not.
Anthony Weir 30 vi 2019
A page of translations of Mandelstam's poem BREATH
The best one is by Paul Celan, of course.
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