00:00From Poems of the 30s to 86, the Stalin epigram by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin.
00:17Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces, you can't hear our words.
00:26But whenever there's a snatch of talk, it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot rims.
00:47Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses, he toys with the tributes of half-men.
00:55One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
01:00He pokes out his finger, and he alone goes boom.
01:05He forges decrees in a line, like horseshoes.
01:12One for the groin, one for the forehead, temple, eye.
01:17He rolls the executions on his tongue, like berries.
01:23He wishes he could hug them, like big friends from home.
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