"..say goodbye to each day.."

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), a man of African heritage born into Russian nobility, became the father of modern Russian literature credited with transformed every form of Russian literature he touched. He took great pride in his mixed blood, and always kept an inkstand with an African figure on his desk.
He was exiled to southern Russia just before his 21st birthday for verses written against despotism. Those poems were found among the papers of members of the Decembrists many of whom were Pushkin’s close friends and acquaintances. The failure of their rebellion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825 led to executions that haunted Pushkin all his life. After learning about the execution of five of the Decembrists leaders, Pushkin wrote a letter to a close friend in which he observed, “the dead were dead and it was now his duty to help the living.” This poem, “Wandering the Noisy Streets,” exemplifies the muse that hauntingly hovered within his soul:

“Wandering the Noisy Streets”

Wandering the noisy streets,
Entering the crowded church,
Sitting among wild young men,
I am lost in my thoughts.

I say to myself: the years will fly,
And however many are here, we shall all
Go down under the eternal vaults.
Someone's hour is already at hand.

Gazing at a solitary oak,
I think: this patriarch
Will outlive my forgotten age
As it outlived the age of my fathers.

When I caress a dear child,
I'm already thinking: goodbye!
I yield my place to you: it's time
For me to decay and you to blossom.

I say goodbye to each day,
Trying to guess
Which among them will be
The anniversary of my death.

And how and where shall I die?
Fighting, travelling, in the waves?
Or will the neighbouring valley
Receive my cold dust?

And though it's all the same
To the feelingless body,
I should like to rest
Closer to the places I love.

And at the grave's entrance
Let young life play,
And the beauty of indifferent nature
Never cease to shine.

                                                Literary Apparel for the Enlightened