AUTUMN
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933- )
Inside me the season is autumn,
the chill is in me, you can see through me,
and I am sad, but not altogether cheerless,
and filled with humility and goodness.
But if I rage sometimes
then I am the one whose rage is shedding my leaves,
and the simple thought comes sadly to me
that raging isn't really what is needed.
The main need is that I should be able
to see myself and the struggling, shocked world
in autumnal nakedness,
when even you, and the world, can be seen right through.
Flashes of insight are the children of silence.
It doesn't matter, if we don't rage aloud.
We must calmly cast off all mere noise
in the name of the new foliage.
Something has apparently happened to me,
and I am relying on nothing but silence,
when the leaves laying themselves one on another
inaudibly become the earth.
And you can see it all, as if from a height,
when you can shed your leaves at the right time,
when without passion your inner autumn
lays its airy fingers on your forehead...
--from Bratsk Station and other new poems © 1967 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
[Note: Yevgeny Yevtushenko is regarded as the foremost Russian poet of the late 20th century, whose work is viewed with the same special esteem by his countrymen as Pasternak and Pushkin before him.]
