Yevgeny Yevtushenko Poems

Pain gnaws into man,
lacerating with its claws.
It’s deposited like salt
somewhere between the vertebrae.
...

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
...

I’ve stopped drinking.
I love my wife.
My own wife- I insist on this.
Living so like an angel,
...

Here is what is happening to me:
my old friend doesn't come to visit,
and in idle vanity
come various folk, not those who should.
...

I came to the cemetery in the hazy heat of autumn,
where the crosses creak as they split,
to my grandmother-Maria Iosefovna-
and bought flowers at the gate.
...

The ice had not even begun to break,
no boat could possibly sail yet,
but the letters lay in a pile at the post office,
with all their requests and instructions.
...

Love unrequited is a crushing yoke;
but if you see love as a game,
a trophy,
then unrequited love’s absurd, a joke-
...

This girl comes from New York
but she does not belong.
Along the neon lights, this girl
runs away from herself.
...

In the burgh of Kharkov-
bursting hail.
Big hail,
big as grape,
...

The bellow of a steamer in the morning
woke the coniferous distances,
...