Heaviness, tenderness—sisters—your marks are the same. The wasps and the honey bees suck at the heavy rose. Man dies, heat drains from the once warm sand, and on a black bier they carry off yesterday's sun. O, you tender nets and you heavy honeycombs, easier to lift a stone than to speak your name! Only one care is left me in the world: a care that is golden, to shed the burden of time. I drink the mutinous air like some dark water. Time is turned up by the plow, and the rose was earth. Slowly they eddy, the heavy, the tender roses, roses of heaviness, tenderness, twofold wreath. March 1920
This poem from Mandelstam’s second collection, "Tristia," was written at Koktebel in the Crimea in the final year of the post-1917 Civil War in Russia. According to Anna Akhmatova, the dead ‘sun’ of line 4 is the poet Alexander Pushkin. Peter France on "[Heaviness, tenderness—sisters—your marks are the same.]"
"The Push to Preserve Where Oscar Wilde Was Jailed" "It was here that Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for around 18 months in the late 19th century because of his homosexuality, and this was the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol.'" viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES
What Sparks Poetry: Sonya Chung on Denis Johnson's "The Incognito Lounge" "Rereading it—both on the page and listening to a recording of Johnson reading it aloud—has been like bathing in enchanted waters: deep pleasure, stimulation of youthful muscle memory, refreshment. Johnson marries the gritty American mundane with the gorgeous sublime like no other writer."
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