Job Discussion Forums

[grahamb]

No wonder Russia's never realised its potential: when they're not imbibing, the bearded ones are wasting time writing poetry. Such decadence!

[Sashadroogie]

Poetry, the highest form of literature, IS Russia realising its potential. To confuse this with decadence suggests strongly that you have been too long in Piggieland, and so can only see world in terms of dollar price, blind to the true value of beauty.

Tsk tsk! Shame on you! Off to the re-education camps!

[grahamb]

Do they play Risk there?

[Sashadroogie]

Да!

[grahamb]

They don't have compulsory poetry readings there, do they?

[Sashadroogie]

But of course they do! How else to get the cultural level of zeks back to a socially acceptable standard?

[Sashadroogie]

Still yesterday he met my gaze,
But now his eyes are darting shiftly!
Till birdsong at first light he stayed,-
Now larks are crows, met with hostility!

So I am stupid, you are wise,
You live, I lie dumbstricken, numb to you.
O how the woman in me cries:
"O my dear love, what have I done to you?"

The ships of lovers-lost set sail,
A white road takes the lover shunning you...
Across the world a long-drawn wail:
"O my dear love, what have I done to you?"

There only yesterday he kneeled.
He called me his "Cathay" admiringly.
Then spread his palm out -- to reveal
A rusty kopek, a life derisory.

Like an infanticide in court
I stand detested, shy, confronting you.
Yet still I ask, when I am brought
To Hell:"O my dear love, what have I done to you?"

I asked the chair, I asked the bed:
"Why should I bear the pain, the misery?"
"He wants to torture you" they said,
"To kiss another. Where's the mistery?"

He taught me living -- at furnace heat,
In icy steppe he left me suddenly.
"That is what you, dear, did to me!
O my dear love, what have I done to you?"

Now all is plain -- don't contradict!
I see again - I'm not your partner.
A heart that love leaves derelict
Is fair terrain for Death-the-Gardener.

Why shake the tree? Ripe apples fall
To earth themself and never trouble you...
Forgive me now, forgive me all
That I, dear love, have ever done to you!

Mariana Tsvetaeva

[Sashadroogie]

Ballad About False Beacons

We’ve been bewitched by countless lies,
by azure images of ice,
by false promises of open sky and sea,
and rescued by a God we don’t believe.
Like coppers rattling from a beggar’s plate
guiding lights have fallen on our days
and burned and died.
We’ve pressed our ship
a pilgrimage of nights toward such lights
as, always elusive, lured and tricked
the keel upon the rocks and ripped
the helmhold from the hand and lashed
the beggared palm to scraps.
Ice tightens at the bow and breath.
To dock, to dropp the anchor to its rest,
to drift (a dream!) on waters quieted
and calmed. We can’t. We’re after a mirage.
(The whiskered walrus brays; the sea salt thaws.
Again, we’re off!)
Raised on powdered milk, we’ll have no faith
in beacons any longer, nor mistake
real for fake, or waking for a dream.
Beacons can’t be trusted. Trust instead
the will of your own hand and head.
Again the captain waves his glass,
sights a beacon, turns and cries
'Helmsman! There’s a beacon. Are you blind? '
But Helmsman, with the truer eye
thinks mutiny and grumbles,
'A mirage.'

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

[grahamb]

I'm all for the Stalin Epigram:

We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,
More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.
But if people would talk on occasion,
They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.

His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,
And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.
Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,
And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.

But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen,
And he plays with the services of these half-men.
Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,
He’s alone booming, poking and whiffing.

He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –
Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
Every killing for him is delight,
And Ossetian torso is wide.

[Sashadroogie]

This is about the third time we've had this....

[grahamb]

History repeating itself, no doubt.

[johnslat]

Can one ever get enough of a really good thing?

Regards,
John

[grahamb]

Well, I never get bored of listening to Good Vibrations. Sasha will no doubt attribute that to the contribution of the Theremin, which was invented by a Russian.

[Sashadroogie]

Pah! A formalist whose only good work was in the bugging devices department, in the camps of course.

[Sashadroogie]

Ангел

По небу полуночи ангел летел,
И тихую песню он пел,
И месяц, и звезды, и тучи толпой
Внимали той песне святой.

Он пел о блаженстве безгрешных духов
Под кущами райских садов,
О Боге великом он пел, и хвала
Его непритворна была.

Он душу младую в объятиях нес
Для мира печали и слез;
И звук его песни в душе молодой
Остался - без слов, но живой.

И долго на свете томилась она,
Желанием чудным полна,
И звуков небес заменить не могли
Ей скучные песни земли.

Михаил Юрьевич Лермонтов