By Marina Tsvetayeva
Like a tender jester of their ugliness,
I narrate the fable of my orphanness.
Behind the prince — a clan, behind a seraph — host,
Behind each person — thousands like themselves, —
So that, if ever stumbling, on a living wall
They'd fall — and know, of thousands ready to replace them!
A soldier of a corps, a demon of the legion proud,
The rabble backs the thief, behind a jester — everything's a hump.
And so, at last, too weary to hold on
With consciousness: to duty, and with purpose: fight along,
Under the laughter of the bourgeois, the whistling of some fool,
Alone, from out of all of them - to fight for all of them - against them all,
I stand and send, grown stone-like, having soared,
This thunderous call into the hollows of the sky,
And this inferno in my chest — let serve as proof
That there's a Karl out there's who'd hear this Horn of mine!