2025-09-07 - Perfection by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

    The wind blows gently, fresh and cool.
    The porch is fragrant with damp pine.
    A duck stretches its wings wide,
    having just laid its egg.
    
    And it looks like a faultless girl,
    having laid in God's design,
    a perfection of white roundness
    on an altar of straw.
    
    And above the muddy, thawing road,
    above the moldering roofs of the huts,
    the perfection of the disc of fire
    rises slowly in the sky.
    
    The perfection of the woods in spring
    all shot through by the dawn,
    almost disembodied, shimmers in mist
    like the breath of the earth, all over the earth.
    
    Not in the frantic shapes of new fashions,
    not in shapes borrowed from others--
    perfection is simply being natural,
    perfection is the breath of the earth.
    
    Don't torment yourself that art is secondary,
    destined only to reflect,
    that it remains so limited and lean,
    compared with nature itself.
    
    Without acting a part
    look to yourself for the source of art,
    and quietly and uniquely
    reproduce yourself just as you are.
    
    Be reflected, as a creature of nature
    bending over a well
    draws the reflection of its face
    up from the ice-ringed depths.

    author: Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 1933-2017

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