11 MAY 1944, Page 11

THE BATTLESHIPS

(From a cycle of poems entitled "Spring in Leningrad.")

THERE, where the Neva's by grey granite overhung,

morosely manacled to shore there stand like to two songs, unfinished though begun, two uncompleted Men of War.

Silenced the sound of metal, and no work now stirs, yet in their lifeless contours there still lives the long curve of their bows, which, as it were, an air of winged onward-striving gives.

The steel breast straining out to sea is adamantly fettered to the shore and no tattoo at eve can sounded be by sailor vying with the tempest's roar.

The wind-swept rigging flapping wistfully, the ship's sides chafing at their shallowness— how piercingly it's all reminding me of all our own begun but uncompleted happiness!

But down the Spring-lit riverside afar a group of Baltic sailor-boys go by sniffing the salt sea-air, the smoke, the tar, clenching their stubborn fists determinedly.

No yearning thoughts can weigh them down with no fire restrain the ardour of their feet. They seek to build all battleships again, all uncompleted singing to complete.

No matter what the wounds they may be bearing, nothing can their bold spirits daunt or curb. We live through storms, we live through tempests searing, but life returns, new cranes will soon be rearing, fortune soon out to sea our ships be steering. Their course lies West.

May nothing it disturb. Pain*

MARGARITA ALIGER (1942)

(Stalin Prize Winner (Transl. from the Russian by Alan Moray