The Making of a Poet

FIVE POEMS BY YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

Yevgeni Yevtushenko, the young Soviet poet who has been visiting this country, was born at Zitna Junction, near Lake Baikal in Siberia, in 1933. These poems are from a selection of his work translated into English by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi, SI, which Penguin Books are to publish in August.

PARTY CARD A shot-up forest full of black holes.

Mind-crushing explosions.

He wants some berries, he wants some berries: the young lieutenant lying in his blood.

I was a smallish boy, who crawled in the long grass till it was dark and brought him back a cap of strawberries, and when they came there was no use for them.

The rain of July lightly falling.

He was lying in remoteness and silence among the ruined tanks and the dead.

The rain glistened on his eyelashes.

There were sadness and worry in his eyes.

1 waited saying nothing and soaking, like waiting for an answer to something he couldn't answer. Passionate with silence unable to see when he asked me.

I took his party card from his pocket.

And small and tired and without understanding wandering in the flushed and smoking dark, met up with refugees moving East and somehow through the terribly flashing night we travelled without tickets, the priest with his long grey hair and his rucksack, and me and a sailor with a wounded arm.

Child crying. Horse whinnying.

And answered to with love and with courage and white, white, the bell-towers rang out speaking to Russia with a tocsin voice.

Wheatfields blackened round their villages.

In the woman's coat I wore at that time I felt for the party card close to my heart.