Call to Account!
POETRY FORMAT, 20 Dec 2021
Vladimir Mayakovsky – TRANSCEND Media Service
The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus.
Soon
the world
won’t have a rib intact.
And its soul will be pulled out.
And trampled down
only for someone,
to lay
their hands on
Mesopotamia.
Why does
a boot
crush the Earth — fissured and rough?
What is above the battles’ sky –
Freedom?
God?
Money!
When will you stand to your full height,
you,
giving them your life?
When will you hurl a question to their faces:
Why are we fighting?
1917
_______________________________________
Translated by Lika Galkina and Jasper Goss, 2005.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (19 July 1893 – 14 April 1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. Though his work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Bolsheviks and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, his relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet state in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism.
Tags: Poetry
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He ends his poem with one of the most important questions.
And, everything that precedes that question points to the absurdities of the answers!
Bravo, Mayakovsky!
Thanks for the translation, Lika Galkina and Jasper Goss!
Thanks for the publication, Antonio and T.M.S.!