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  • Selling Watermelons
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Selling Watermelons

Andrei Voznesensky

Moscow is milling with watermelons.
Everything breathes a boundless freedom.
And it blows with unbridled fierceness
from the breathless melonvendors.

Stalls. Din. Girls’ headscarves.
They laugh. Change bangs down. Knives

and a choice sample slice.
̶ Take one, chief, for a long life!
Who’s for a melon?
Freshly split!

And just as tasty and just as juicy are
the capbands of policemen
and the ranks of motor-scooters.
The September air is fresh and keen
and resonant as a watermelon.

And just as joyfully on its own tack
as the city-limit melon-multitudes,
the earth swings
in its great string bag
of meridians and latitudes!


Andrei Voznesensky

from Edwin Morgan: Collected Translations (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996) translated by Edwin Morgan

Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.

Tags:

Autumn everyday life fruit markets Russian

About this poem

This poem is part of The Written World – our collaboration with BBC radio to broadcast a poem from every single nation competing in London 2012.

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Andrei Voznesensky1933 - 2010

Voznesensky was born in Moscow in 1933. He received a degree in engineering from the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1957, and his first poems were published in 1958. Voznesensky received many honours.  In 1976 a newly-discovered asteroid was named for...
More about Andrei Voznesensky

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