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In this collection, chronologically ordered, the poems become increasingly strong. The one below, "We Live," however, was about Joseph Stalin, the autocratic leader of the Soviet Union where Mandelstam lived.

When Mandelstam read this mocking poem aloud, one in the group of listeners worked for Fox News and, as an informer, reported him. Here is the poem that led to Mandelstam's exile and eventual death:


We Live

We live, and love, but our lives drift like mist over what we love.
Two steps we are a whisper; ten, gone.

Still, we gather, we gossip, we laugh like humans,
And just like that our Kremlin gremlin comes alive:

His grubworm clutch, all oil and vile,
His deadweight deadwords, blonk blonk.

Listen: his jackhammering jackboots: even the chandelier shakes.
Look: a hairy cockroach crawls along his grin

At the cluck-cluck of turkey-lackeys, and he busts a gut
At the wobblegobble dance one does without a head.

Tweet-tweet, meow-meow, Please sir, more porridge:
He alone, his grub growing hard, goes No! goes Now! goes
Boom!

Half-cocked blacksmith, he lifts from hell's hottest forge
His latest law and with it brands a breast, a groin, a brain,

And like a pig farmer who's plucked a blackberry from a vine,
Savors the sweet spurt, before he turns back to his swine.


You can see the parallels, I'm sure. Especially "his deadweight deadwords, blonk blonk" that we have to listen to again and again when we just wish he would shut up once and for all. Then the dreaded "Tweet-tweet." Jesus. Not another tweet.



And, when you're feeling cheerful, you can read the likes of this:


Today Is All Beak

Today is all beak, little yellow hell
Pecking, pecking at my stone brain.

And the seaside dock gates, and the locked anchor chains,
Even the inchoate mist, see, somehow me.

Black warships inching distance as though oil.
Black wakes like waves of sound that never sounded.

And here, between the boat slips, icy emaciations
Past blackness somehow, the color of plummet...