Nostalgia for the present
.
I don’t know about the rest of you,
but I feel the cruelest
nostalgia -not for the past-
but nostalgia for the present.
A novice desires to approach the Lord
but is permitted to do so only by her Superior.
I beg to be joined, without intermediary,
to the present.
It’s as if I had done something wrong,
Not I even –but others.
I fall down in a field and feel
nostalgia for the living earth.
No one can ever tear you away,
and yet when I embrace you again
I feel overcome by terrible pain
as if you were being stolen from me.
When I hear the nasty tirades
of a friend who has taken a false step,
I don’t look for what he seems to be,
I grieve for what he really is.
A window opening on a garden
will not redeem loneliness.
I long not for art –I choke
on my craving for reality.
And when the Mafia laughs in my face
idiotically, I say:
“Idiots are all in the past. The present
calls for fuller understanding.”
Black water spurts from the faucet,
Brackish water, stale water,
rusty water flows from the faucet –I’ll wait
for the real water to come.
Whatever is past is past. So much the better.
But I bite at it as at a mystery,
nostalgia for the impending
present.
And I’ll never catch hold of it.
.
by Andrei Voznesensky
from World Poetry Movement
translation:Vera Dunham and H. W. Tjalsma
.