Sisters

Portrait of Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam 1891–1938

Sisters - Heaviness and Tenderness- you look the same. Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose. Man dies, and the hot sand cools again. Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday's sun goes.

Oh, honeycombs' heaviness, nets' tenderness, it's easier to lift a stone than to say your name! I have one purpose left, a golden purpose, how, from time's weight, to free myself again.

I drink the turbid air like a dark water. The rose was earth; time, ploughed from underneath. Woven, the heavy, tender roses, in a slow vortex, the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.

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