Conversation with an American Writer

'You have courage, ' they tell me.
It's not true. I was never courageous.
I simply felt it unbecoming
to stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.

I've shaken no foundations.
I simply mocked at pretense and inflation.
Wrote articles. Scribbled no denunciations.
And tried to speak all on my mind.
Yes, I defended men of talent,
branding the hacks, the would-be writers.
But this, in general, we should always do;
and yet they keep stressing my courage.
Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame
to remember, when punishing vile acts,
that most peculiar time, when
plain honesty was labeled 'courage'...

poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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We Should Be Stingier

We should be stingier
breathing out and breathing in-
then, perhaps, the epic
will lie down in neat quatrains.

We have to be more generous,
louder, like the outcry 'Follow me! '
stronger, coarser-
with the earth's coarse globe.

I envy the relics of space,
compressed by the word in layers,
but brevity is the sister of ineptitude
when it springs from emptiness.

Not all conciseness is priceless.
Rhymed oil cakes are stiff and brittle,
and someone's square hay,
I wouldn't eat if I were a horse.

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poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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Tomorrow's Wind

Why am I without joy,
achieving everything,
but grasping
nothing at all?
I dream of the wind
that has overtaken me,
the wind
that has leaped over me.
It shreds
all the telephone lines that sag
from unending chatter,
and all that’s wasted,
all that’s turned sour
it catapults
into oblivion.
All sorts of butwhatifers,
shaking,
like jelly in jackets,
whirled up in a vortex,
like fallen leaves,

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poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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