Get Your Premium Membership

The Age

 My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries' worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.
While the creature still has life, The spine must be delivered, While with the unseen backbone A wave distracts itself.
Again they've brought the peak of life Like a sacrificial lamb, Like a child's supple cartilage— The age of infant earth.
To free the age from its confinement, To instigate a brand new world, The discordant, tangled days Must be linked, as with a flute.
It's the age that rocks the swells With humanity's despair, And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes The golden measure of the age.
Still the shoots will swell And the green buds sprout But your spinal cord is crushed, My fantastic, wretched age! And in lunatic beatitude You look back, cruel and weak, Like a beast that once was agile, At the tracks left by your feet.
The creating blood gushes From the throat of earthly things, The lukewarm cartilage of oceans Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high From the humid azure stones, Streams a flood of helpless apathy On your single, fatal wound.

Poem by Osip Mandelstam
Biography | Poems | Best Poems | Short Poems | Quotes | Email Poem - The AgeEmail Poem | Create an image from this poem

Poems are below...



More Poems by Osip Mandelstam

Comments, Analysis, and Meaning on The Age

Provide your analysis, explanation, meaning, interpretation, and comments on the poem The Age here.

Commenting turned off, sorry.


Book: Shattered Sighs