Tomorrow's Wind

Why am I without joy, achieving everything, but grasping nothing at all? I dream of the wind that has overtaken me, the wind that has leaped over me. It shreds all the telephone lines that sag from unending chatter, and all that’s wasted, all that’s turned sour it catapults into oblivion. All sorts of butwhatifers, shaking, like jelly in jackets, whirled up in a vortex, like fallen leaves, shout down indignantly: 'How come? ' Where there’s no wind, there’s no faith. Let clammy red pencils be strewn among the reeds, scattered madly by tomorrow’s wind. Wind does not crawl before idols, it swirls scraps of newspapers and posters, yesterday’s glories, turning somersaults over warped roofs. As if it had swilled the Decembrists’ hot punch, tipsy, the wind flings upward all the important little papers that press us down to the ground. The wind showers under constellations the garbage in which the world is bogged down: automobiles, which have ridden over people, furniture, which has sprawled on us. The wind pulls away from sticky screens all the bewitched simpletons and fools, and without thinking plants them like shashlik on the spike of their beloved TV tower... Timid youth, I am preaching to you: Charge forward, headlong into the epoch, without wasting the wind of history either on fads or the flimsy. Each new generation must create a special wind. If it doesn’t shake bits of dust, young people should send an SOS. Youth is the age for a fresh airing. In old age it’s harder to be precocious, if you put off being young in your youth. Is it possible for you all to be unfit? Suck in the time with a feverous mouth. The calm will be inhaled by you, by the wind exhaled afterward. And the wind, making a gift of itself to the universe, is born, sprawling in a burst, and structures built on sand rightfully will crumble. And I, having reared these structures not a little, will look on happily, blaming no one, as it withdraws, arching its mane, the wind that has leaped over me. 1977 Translated by Albert C. Todd