It was the end of October

Georgian Version here.

* * *

It was the end of October
the type of day when each cloud
in the air seems like Versailles:
the sun too tired to warm it.
It was autumn.
Even the trees were listless,
so listless!
Once in a while, like a tear,
a leaf was cast from a hopeless branch —
golden. Golden
amber piled on the garden path.
And something there was fidgety
in the withered twigs and leaves,
their rustling which generates
all of autumn’s mystery.
The garden was deserted
and
the empty wooden chairs
triggered an illusion
of summer shortly past.
Then summer vanished.
A dreamy young woman
in iris-hued clothes
with golden hair,
the face of Veronica,
and a sky-colored book in her hand
(labeled “Shelley”)
wandered slowly on the garden path.
At a Linden tree, she cut with a carving
knife the word:
Mary.
Her name.
Somewhere they were chopping wood.
The air was thick with copper.
All at once, a small cloud
melancholically stretched
in the sky swiftly turned
wholly hiding the sun.
The listless trees trembled.
A golden column
of leaves swirled in the air,
the dry branches muttering.
And the wind opened Percy Bysshe
Shelly’s blue book
right to the start
of that immortal line
from Time Long Past.
Each New Year’s Eve
I think of this moment--I half-open Musset
to a particular sonnet, which on the twelth page
ends in this way:
Car qui m’eut dit, madame,
que votre coeur sitôt avait changé pour moi?
Are these lines not truly
worth a whole poem?
Myself, I do not know what happens to me:
I can not keep calm for even one minute.
I want to strike out over the mountains
muffled in mist, to look at the world
from every pole. To say:
Lend me your ears.
I will look at this world
and loudly declaim
I defy you!
I love you!
With two million eyes
I look at this New Year
Ninteen-Twenty-Three
And I say:
To the Future!
Victory! Victory!