I Would Like...

I would like

to be born

in every country,

have a passport

for them all

to throw

all foreign offices

into panic,

be every fish

in every ocean

and every dog

in the streets of the world.

I don’t want to bow down

before any idols

or play at being

a Russian Orthodox church hippie,

but I would like to plunge

deep into Lake Baikal

and surface snorting

somewhere,

why not in the Mississippi?

In my damned beloved universe

I would like

to be a lonely weed,

but not a delicate Narcissus

kissing his own mug

in the mirror.

I would like to be

any of God’s creatures

right down to the last mangy hyena--

but never a tyrant

or even the cat of a tyrant.

I would like to be

reincarnated as a man

in any image:

a victim of prison tortures,

a homeless child in the slums of Hong Kong,

a living skeleton in Bangladesh,

a holy beggar in Tibet,

a black in Cape Town,

but never

in the image of Rambo.

The only people whom I hate

are the hypocrites--

pickled hyenas

in heavy syrup.

I would like to lie

under the knives of all the surgeons in the world,

be hunchbacked, blind,

suffer all kinds of diseases,

wounds and scars,

be a victim of war,

or a sweeper of cigarette butts,

just so a filthy microbe of superiority

doesn’t creep inside.

I would not like to be in the elite,

nor, of course,

in the cowardly herd,

nor be a guard dog of that herd,

nor a shepherd,

sheltered by that herd.

And I would like happiness,

but not at the expense of the unhappy,

and I would like freedom,

but not at the expense of the unfree.

I would like to love

all the women in the world,

and I would like to be a woman, too--

just once...

Men have been diminished

by Mother Nature.

Why couldn’t we give motherhood

to men?

If an innocent child

stirred

below his heart,

man would probably

not be so cruel.

I would like to be man’s daily bread--

say,

a cup of rice

for a Vietnamese woman in mourning,

cheap wine

in a Neapolitan workers’ trattoria,

or a tiny tube of cheese

in orbit round the moon.

Let them eat me,

let them drink me,

only let my death

be of some use.

I would like to belong to all times,

shock all history so much

that it would be amazed

what a smart aleck I was.

I would like to bring Nefertiti

to Pushkin in a troika.

I would like to increase

the space of a moment

a hundredfold,

so that in the same moment

I could drink vodka with fishermen in Siberia

and sit together with Homer,

Dante,

Shakespeare,

and Tolstoy,

drinking anything,

except, of course,

Coca-Cola,

--dance to the tom-toms in the Congo,

--strike at Renault,

--chase a ball with Brazilian boys

at Copacabana Beach.

I would like to know every language,

like the secret waters under the earth,

and do all kinds of work at once.

I would make sure

that one Yevtushenko was merely a poet,

the second--an underground fighter

somewhere,

I couldn’t say where

for security reasons,

the third--a student at Berkeley,

the fourth--a jolly Georgian drinker,

and the fifth--

maybe a teacher of Eskimo children in Alaska,

the sixth--

a young president,

somewhere, say, modestly speaking, in Sierra Leone,

the seventh--

would still be shaking a rattle in his stroller,

and the tenth...

the hundredth...

the millionth...

For me it’s not enough to be myself,

let me be everyone!

Every creature

usually has a double,

but God was stingy

with the carbon paper,

and in his Paradise Publishing Corporation

made a unique copy of me.

But I shall muddle up

all God’s cards--

I shall confound God!

I shall be in a thousand copies to the end of my days,

so that the earth buzzes with me,

and computers go berserk

in the world census of me.

I would like to fight on all your barricades,

humanity,

dying each night

like an exhausted moon,

and resurrecting each morning

like a newborn sun,

with an immortal soft spot--fontanel--

on my head.

And when I die,

a smart-aleck Siberian Francois Villon,

do not lay me in the earth

of France

or Italy,

but in our Russian, Siberian earth,

on a still-green hill,

where I first felt

that I was

everyone.

Composed and translated from the original Russian
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Loved above all other poems
by Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name
This is the one poem that is written in my heart and I wished to write, but Yevgeny wrote it first and more beautifully than I could ever possibly hope to do. Only a Russian could write such a poem ...

Every Song

                    Every song

                    is the remains

                    of love.

                    Every light

                    the remains

                    of time.

                    A knot

                    of time.

                    And every sigh

                    the remains

                    of a cry.

By:  Federico Garcia Lorca

I am...

Oh, that I have lived....

To love

The past, yesterday’s songs

Tomorrow’s tears

By:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

The Sun

Each day the gold sun comes over the hill.
The woods are beautiful, also the dark animals,
Also man; hunter or farmer.

The fish rises with a red body in the green pond.
Under the arch of heaven
The fisherman travels smoothly in his blue skiff.

The grain, the cluster of grapes, ripens slowly.
When the still day comes to an end,
Both evil and good have been prepared.

When the; night has come,
Easily the pilgrim lifts his heavy eyelids;
The sun breaks from gloomy ravines.

By:  Georg Trakl
Copied, pasted and loved by:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

By:  Robert Frost
Moved by it always:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is My Name

In My Sky At Twilight

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and colour are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
the sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine!

You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon's
wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depth of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.

You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin. 

by:  Pablo Neruda

Copied, pasted and loved by:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is My Name

The Sparrow

This sparrow

                who comes to sit at my window

                                is a poetic truth

more than a natural one.

                His voice,

                                his movements,

his habits—

                how he loves to

flutter his wings

in the dust—

                all attest it;

                                granted, he does it

to rid himself of lice

                but the relief he feels

                                makes him

cry out lustily—

                which is a trait

                                more related to music

than otherwise.

                Wherever he finds himself

                                In early spring,

on back streets

                or besides palaces,

                                he carries on

unaffectedly

                his amours.

                                It begins in the egg,

his sex genders it:

                What is more pretentiously

                                useless

or about which

                We more pride ourselves?

                                It leads as often as not

to our undoing.

                The cockerel, the crow

                                With their challenging voices

cannot surpass

                the insistence

                                of his cheep!

Once

                At El Paso

                                Toward evening,

I saw—and heard!—

                ten thousand sparrows

                                who had come in from

the desert

                to roost.  They filled the trees

                                of a small park.  Men fled

(with ears ringing!)

                from their droppings,

                                leaving the premises

to the alligators

                who inhabit

                                the fountain.  His image

is familiar

                as that of the aristocratic

                                unicorn, a pity

there are not more oats eaten

                nowadays

                                to make living easier

for him.

                At that,

                                His small size,

keen eyes,

                serviceable beak

                                and general truculence

assure his survival—

                to say nothing

                                of his innumerable

brood.

                Even the Japanese

                                know him

and have painted him

                sympathetically,

                                with profound insight

into his minor

characteristics.

                                Nothing even remotely

subtle

                about his lovemaking.

                                He crouches

before the female,

                drags his wings,

                                waltzing,

throws back his head

                and simply—

                                yells! The din

is terrific.

                The way he swipes his bill

                                across a plank

to clean it,

                is decisive.

                                So with everything

he does.  His coppery

                eyebrows

                                give him the air

of being always

                a winner—and yet

                                I saw one,

the female of his species

                clinging determinedly

                                to the edge of

a water pipe,

                catch him

                                by his crown-feathers

to hold him

                silent,

                                subdued,

hanging above the city streets

                until

                                she was through with him.

What was the use

                of that?

                                She hung there

herself,

                puzzled at her success.

                                I laughed heartily.

Practical to the end,

                It is a poem of his existence

that triumphed

                finally;

                                a wisp of feathers

flattened to the pavement,       

                wings spread symmetrically

                                as if in flight,

the head gone,

                the black escutcheon of the breast

                                undecipherable,

an effigy of a sparrow,

                a dried wafer only,

                                left to say

and it says it

                without offense,

                                beautifully;

This was I,

                a sparrow,

                                I did my best;

farewell.

by:  William Carlos Williams
Copied, pasted and loved by:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is My Name