Like a Starling

Much we have to fear,
big-mouth beside me!

Our tobacco turns into dust,
nut-cracker, friend, idiot!

And I could have whistled through life like a starling,
eating nut pies…

But clearly there’s no chance of that.

~ Osip Mandelstam

Mandelstam once wrote that “only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed.”  He was last seen at a gulag transit station in Vladivostok in 1938.