Sergey Yesenin’s 1920 poem “Sorokoust” about a foal running after a train

Have you seen
How it runs across the steppes,
Hiding in the lake mists,
Snorting through an iron nostril,
A train on cast-iron paws?
And behind it
Through the tall grass,
As at a festival of desperate races,
Flinging its slender legs up towards its head,
Gallops a red-maned foal?
Dear, dear, funny little fool,
Where is he going, what is he chasing?
Does he not know that living horses
Have been defeated by the cavalry of steel?
Does he not know that in the shining-less fields
His running will not bring back that time
When a pair of fair Russian steppe maidens
Was given by the Pecheneg for a horse?
Fate at the market has repainted things differently,
Our reach of water, woken by the grinding of iron,
And for thousands of poods of horse hide and meat
They now buy a steam locomotive.

Literal translation

From the poem "Sorokoust" [Forty Masses], Sergey Yesenin, 1920