To You, in a Hundred Years

To you, who are to be born
A century hence, once I have breathed my last,
From the very depths, like one condemned to death,
I write with my own hand:

"Friend! Do not look for me! The fashion is different!
Even the old men do not remember me.
Out of reach of my lips! Across the waters of Lethe
I stretch out my two hands.

I see your eyes like two bonfires,
Blazing at me in my grave, in hell,
Seeing her whom no hand moves,
Dead a hundred years ago.

With me in my hand, almost a handful of dust,
My poems! I see: in the wind
You search for the house where I was born, or
In which I shall die.

At the women you meet, those living and happy,
I am proud of how you look, and I catch your words:
"A gathering of impostors! You are all dead!
She alone is alive!

I served her with a volunteer's service!
I knew all her secrets, the whole stock of her rings!
Robbers of the dead! These rings
Were stolen from her!

O my hundred rings! It pulls at my sinews,
For the first time I repent
That I gave so many of them away, askew and aslant,
That I did not wait for you!

And I am sad too that on this evening,
This one, today, so long did I walk after
The setting sun, and towards
You, across a hundred years.

I bet you will hurl a curse
At my friends into the gloom of the graves:
"They all praised her! A pink dress
No one gave her!

Who was more disinterested?" No, I am self-interested!
Since you will not kill me, I have no interest in hiding
That I begged everyone for letters
To kiss at night.

Shall I tell you? I shall! Non-being is a convention.
You are to me now the most passionate of guests,
And you will refuse the pearl of all women lovers
In the name of that one, of bones.

Literal translation

Marina Tsvetaeva, August 1919