Advice for Someone Going into Prison

If instead of getting the rope

you're thrown inside

for not cutting off hope

from your world, your country, your people;

if you do a ten or fifteen year stretch,

or more than the time you have left

don't say:

'Better to have swung at the end of a rope like a flag.'

You must insist on living.

There may not be happiness

but it is your binding duty

to resist the enemy

and live one extra day.

Inside, one part of you may live completely alone

like a stone at the bottom of a well.

But the other part of you

must so involve yourself

in the whirl of the world,

that inside you will shudder

when outside a leaf trembles on the ground forty days away.

Waiting for a letter inside,

singing melancholic songs,

staying awake all night, eyes glued to the ceiling,

is sweet but dangerous.

Look at your face from shave to shave,

forget how old you are,

protect yourself from lice, and from spring evenings,

and eat your bread to the very last crumb

and don't ever forget the freedom of laughter.

Who knows,

if the woman you love no longer loves you,

it's no small thing,

it's like the breaking of a fresh green twig

to the man inside.

Inside it's bad to think of roses and gardens.

It's good to think of mountains and oceans.

Never stop reading and writing,

and I recommend you weaving

and silvering mirrors.

What I'm saying is that inside, ten years or fifteen years

or even more can be got through,

they really can:

enough that you never let the precious stone

under your left breast grow dull.

(May 1949)

Optimism

I write poems,

they don't get published

but they will get published.

I wait for a letter to bring me good news

maybe it will come on the day I die

but it will come.

No state nor money

the world will be run by human beings

maybe it will happen a hundred years from now

no matter

but this is the way it's going to happen for sure.

(12 September 1957 Moscow)