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Excerpt from a poem in Russian ("Slava").
Written March 21-22, 1942.
Published Novyy zhumal 2 (1942). Translated by VN.

... I kept changing countries like counterfeit money,
hurrying on and afraid to look back,
like a phantom dividing in two, like a candle
between mirrors sailing into the sun.

It is far to the meadows where I sobbed in my childhood
having missed an Apollo, and farther yet
to the alley of firs where the midday sunlight
glowed with fissures of fire between bands of jet.

But my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct,
spans the world, and across in strobe-effect spin
of spokes I keep endlessly passing incognito
into the flame-licked night of my native land.

[Poems and Problems 105, 113]

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