Text
Over the empty fields a black kite hovers,
and circle after circle smoothly weaves.
In the poor hut, over her son in the cradle
a mother grieves:
‘There, suck my breast: there, grow and take our bread,
and learn to bear your cross and bow your head.
Time passes. War returns. Rebellion rages.
The farms and villages go up in flame,
and Russia in her ancient tear-stained beauty,
is yet the same,
unchanged through all the ages. How long will
the mother grieve and the kite circle still?
Source
Alexander Blok, The Kite, trans. by Frances Cornford and Esther Polianowsky Salaman, in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, ed. by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski (Penguin Classics, 2015), p. 192.
(Note: not yet standardised)
Original Format
Poem
Citation
Alexander Blok, “The Kite,” War in other words, accessed May 4, 2024, https://warinotherwords.exeter.ac.uk/items/show/17.