Sisters

Osip Mandelstam

Sisters - Heaviness and Tenderness- you look the same.
Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose.
Man dies, and the hot sand cools again.
Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterdays sun goes.

Oh, honeycombs heaviness, nets tenderness,
its easier to lift a stone than to say your name!
I have one purpose left, a golden purpose,
how, from times weight, to free myself again.

I drink the turbid air like a dark water.
The rose was earth; time, ploughed from underneath.
Woven, the heavy, tender roses, in a slow vortex,
the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.

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