each glance widens desolation--
and now across the calm, swims
this unsonorous chorus of birds.
I am poor as nature,
plain as heaven,
and my freedom is as false
as the voice of midnight birds.
I see a breathless moon
in a sky that's dead, like canvas.
I accept--so pitable, so strange--
this world in all its emptiness!
(Osip Mandelstam)