(Word-for-word translation by the poet)

O mankind, I keep asking, full of worry:

My heart’s been torn by question… in response,

I’ll blast your deadly ease with question --

What for so avidly you crash the world?

You spiced voraciousness with easy talking.

Gone hog-wild in a blaze to prison all…

If not for fright of being burnt with sun-shoots,

The disk of sun you gladly would explode

The sun is priceless, the air is given to us generously.

We hear the voice of Mother-Nature.

Why then the planet’s wealth and subsoil

Should not be common for us all.

But we mutinously keep tearing to pieces

The world, like hungry wolves would do.

But if one’s sure sharing is scapeless,

So why so indivisible is Shakespeare?

The life keeps calling us, we started looking forward

To space depths, so inviting depth.

It’s possible that the “universal” men

Are willing to start a talk with us?

And if this meeting is predestined

And we have to open our own selves fully

I wish I be the legate from the whole Earth

To open window to the far-away space.

If suddenly disaster thundered somewhere,

And blackness of the sky yawns over Earth

And the calamity devours the mankind cities,

Who possibly can save from this misery?

We fatally, being like hostages of nuclear;

The sky, the land, the navy stuffed with it

And on the edge of ecumenical disaster,

We keep constructing our own scaffold

Oh if the planet suddenly shudders

And the earth being flares out in war

Then the deadpan missiles

Will turn our home into space dust.

Whilst we don’t see the light in end of tunnel --

Don’t cry havoc and be profound.

We guarded are by tired planet

Which covers us from Heaven forces with its breast.

We either do not want to live in peace, or we cannot?

Scaring each other on and on

Can it be true that we will centuple the evil?

And blindly will step forward to the perish?

Efim Tedeev