Spring - Boris Pasternak

How many sticky buds, candle ends
sprout from the branches! Steaming
April. Puberty sweats from the park,
and the forest’s blatantly gleaming.

A noose of feathered throats grips
the wood’s larynx, a lassoed steer,
netted, like a gladiatorial organ,
it groans steel-piped sonatas here.

Poetry! Be a Greek sponge with suckers,
among green stickiness drenched,
I’ll consent, by the sopping wood
of a green-stained garden bench.

Grow sumptuous pleats and flounces,
suck up the gullies and clouds,
Poetry, tonight, I’ll squeeze you out
to make the parched sheets flower.

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Boris Pasternak (1890 – 1960) Russia
Translated by A. S. Kline
Source: Poets of Modernity Translations into English by A. S. Kline