It was the middle of April. And so:
Sasha invited me to his birthday,
Irina received the same invitation that day.
So off we go to Sasha, laughing as we come,
When boys walk up to us and say:
Let’s have a fight, come on!
We said back then that we could only at five,
We went on our way, and the boys stayed alive.
We’re walking back from Sasha’s, laughing as we come,
The boys walk up to us again:
Let’s have a fight, come on!
The most interesting thing is that I remember very little of what I wrote by heart. Something about birthdays. About Sasha’s tenth birthday and an ode to the birthday of my friend Olya in the tenth grade:
O birthday day! O birthday bright!
Flowers all around, a table white.
I’ll give you roots, a hunter’s gun,
A cartridge too — an empty one,
I’ll give a little piece of wood,
Where branches stretch and silence stood,
Where in the heather, all alone,
A nightingale sings on its own.
I’ll give a hundred giant suns,
The lovely moon when daylight runs,
And twenty-three modest handkerchiefs too,
And one geography book for you.
And for a gift I’ll also bring
One hundred grams of boiled sausage,
And with gouache I’ll paint on you
A Budyonny-style moustache….
And so on….
My interest in writing odes ended in my first year after the self-publication, in the institute wall newspaper, of my “Ode to a Starving Student”:
The last greeting is heard on the air:
We ate the dean. No money anywhere.
All the reagents were drunk long ago,
All Eskimo sticks were eaten in tow,
And as a side dish we swallowed a tram,
So many hungry — don’t you dawdle, ma’am!
Oh, what a stomach a student can have:
We ate knives, and glasses, and every plate we have,
Only in the gloom of cold, dark nights
One hears the grinding of students’ bones in fright.
The telegraph wires quietly ring:
Yesterday we ate the zoo’s giraffe, poor thing….
And that ode ended with the words:
Where are the parcels? Where is your reply?
We ate the rector, no money nearby.
I was an open, all-loving girl, and I sincerely could not understand why our wall newspaper was discussed at the institute party bureau. We were told about it by fellow students who had already outgrown youth organizations by then.
I found it funny, nothing more, but my interest in odes disappeared.
Then came love poetry, which from time to time made me reach for a pencil.
However, I never memorized that lyrical poetry either, even when rhymed lines, as if dreamed, woke me at night. And instead of a glass of water, as is customary in respectable families, there was always some notebook and a pencil lying next to my pillow. In my opinion, a pencil somehow suited what had been invented better.
The fact that I myself did not remember my writings saved many of my acquaintances from listening to them: I could not stand on a stool and declaim. It did not save everyone.
I was greatly supported in this writing side of my life by the wonderful Volgograd poet Sergei Vasilyev, who left us so early. We had a telephone exchange of poems. Sergei would call whenever the muse came to him, regardless of the hour, and say: “I’ve written some nastiness here. Shall I read it?” — and he would read his magnificent poems. Then he would always ask me to read something of mine, something new. And he often said some creatively supportive words, pleasing to my poem-writing ear.
I was lucky in life with poet friends. They are all very talented and so different; with some of them we were true friends, real friends, but Sergei Vasilyev was my poetic guru.
