Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

We begin as jubilation, while already it has surpassed us ;
Suddenly, our weight turns the song into a lament.
But even so: Lament Were it not a younger jubilation downward.
Also the lower gods want to be praised, Marina.
Innocent as the gods are, they are waiting for praise like their adherents
To praise, my love, let us be lavish with praise.
Nothing belongs to us. We merely wrap our hand around the necks
of unbroken flowers. I saw it at the Nile at Kom-Ombo.
This way, Marina, a donation, themselves abstaining, offer the Kings.
Like the angels go and mark the doors of those to be saved,
So we touch this and that, seemingly tender one.
Oh, how ecstastatic you are already, oh, how distracted, Marina,
even in the most intimate pretext. A sign-giver, nothing else.
This quiet pursuit[business], where one of us
can no longer bear it and resolves to act,
takes its revenge and kills. For, that its power is deadly,
we all noticed by its restrained manner and its delicacy
and by the strange force, which changes us living into
survivors. Non-being. Do you realize, how often
a blind command carried us through the icy antechamber
of new birth. . . Bore: us A body of eyes
refusing under countless eyelids. Bore the in us
flung-down heart of an entire generation. To a goal of migratory birds
it bore the group, the mirage of our adrift mutation.
II.
Those who love, Marina, ought not to know so much
about perdition. They must be like new.
Only their grave is old, only when their grave remembers, darkly
under the sobbing tree, it recalls the past
Only their grave caves in; they themselves are bendable like switches;
what bends them excessively, rounds them amply into a wreath.
How they are blown away by the wind in May! From the middle of Time,
in which you breathe and guess, that the moment excludes them.
(Oh, how I grasp you, female flower on the same
immortal shrub. How I disperse myself strongly into the night air
which will touch you soon). Early learned the gods
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