February. Take Ink and Weep

by Boris Pasternak

February. Take ink and weep,

write February as you're sobbing,

while black Spring burns deep

through the slush and throbbing.

Take a cab. For a clutch of copecks,

through bell-towers' and wheel noise,

go where the rain-storm's din breaks,

greater than crying or ink employs.

Where rooks in thousands falling,

like charred pears from the skies,

drop down into puddles, bringing

cold grief to the depths of eyes.

Below, the black shows through,

and the wind's furrowed with cries:

the more freely, the more truly

then, sobbing verse is realized.

Winter Night

Snow, snow over the whole land

across all boundaries.

The candle burned on the table,

The candle burned.

BIO: Boris Pasternak, author of the acclaimed novel Dr. Zhivago,was born January 29, 1890. The book was banned in the USSR but copies smuggled out of the country earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. He was forced to decline the award by the Soviet government and died of lung cancer two years later.  Although initially admiring Lenin and the "splendid surgery" of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he later denounced Soviet Communism as inhumane.