What is the matter with the landscape?
Familiar landmarks are not there.
Ploughed fields, like squares upon a chessboard,
Today are scattered everywhere.
The newly-harrowed vast expanses
So evenly are spread about,
As though the valley had been spring-cleaned
Or else the mountains flattened out.
And that same day, in one endeavour,
Outside the furrows every tree
Bursts into leaf, light-green and downy,
And stretches skyward, tall and free.
No speck of dust on the new maples,
And colours nowhere are as clean
As is the light-grey of the ploughland
And as the silver-birch’s green.
(Boris Pasternak)
More Poetry from Boris Pasternak:
- The Wind(Four fragments concerning Blok) (Boris Pasternak Poems)
- Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping... (Boris Pasternak Poems)
- Fairy Tale (Boris Pasternak Poems)
- 1918 (Boris Pasternak Poems)
- Wet Paint (Boris Pasternak Poems)
- From A Poem (Boris Pasternak Poems)