Sisters

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Sisters - Heaviness and Tenderness- you look the same.
 Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose.
 Man dies, and the hot sand cools again.
 Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday’s sun goes.

 Oh, honeycombs’ heaviness, nets’ tenderness,
 it’s easier to lift a stone than to say your name!
 I have one purpose left, a golden purpose,
 how, from time’s weight, to free myself again.

 I drink the turbid air like a dark water.
 The rose was earth; time, ploughed from underneath.
 Woven, the heavy, tender roses, in a slow vortex,
 the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.

© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam