A LETTER FROM ALEKSANDER PUSHKIN TO / ANNA KERN FROM THE OTHER WORLD Poem by Henry Luque

How monotonous eternity is, everything smells
Of wilted flowers, incense and oblivion;
Here light wears a cloak, angels are drab
And their soft murmur tunes the wings of sleep.
Remembering the absolute horrors of my Russia keeps me awake.
Just evoking your eyes of blue fire,
Your hair entangled with my life, your insane hands,
Give me a caress without grief as a present.
The emperor and his double-beaked eagle
Yearned to throw my body to the dogs.
Death lay in ambush for my shadow, questioned my pen,
My tongue and my ear, and I kept it away
With the outburst of verses and the drum roll of your pace.
Today I was encircled by a gust of wind that had your form
And I wanted to go into it and transform myself and assume
The profile of my loved and elusive Freedom.
You well know that the dead speak, that truth
Melts the marble and that the look of an honest man
Can destroy the arms of the degenerate gods.
But I shall remember our appointment: when my monument
Was arriving your body got in its way on the street, your body
A thousand times asleep in the box of time.
I know that your heart trembled like the loneliest autumn leaf.
But it was not you who came in my search.
It was I who became stone to see you pass by.