"Leaves scarcely breathing..."

Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.

In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.



From Stone 24 by Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin, The selected poems of Osip Mandelstam

Summer, Gustave Doré, 1860-70