Wounds by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Wounds by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

T.

Hello, Sunday. It is lunch time. I am reading another bruising love letter after digging for old poems in this place. No, the letter is not old, but the hurting is.

Wounds

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Translated by Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin

To D.G.

I have been wounded so often and so painfully,

dragging my way home at the merest crawl,

impaled not only by malicious tongues—

one can be wounded even by a petal.

And I myself have wounded—quite unwittingly—

with casual tenderness while passing by,

and later someone felt the pain,

it was like walking barefoot over the ice.

So why do I step upon the ruins

of those most near and dear to me,

I, who can be so simply and so sharply wounded

and can wound others with such deadly ease?

—

From The Collected Poems: 1952-1990 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, published by Henry Holt and Company, 1991.

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poetry