Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.

A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.

Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.

For generations the seasons are lies,
Since neither love nor life is free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world gasps

The old world gasps in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascend and push the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.

And now the sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.

The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring the seams of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.

For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over those wide lands her church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s ever-spring