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I want to go with you to the city with a name short as life,
where the eagle sun circles in the blossoming columns,
undried drops on milky hills, below
the heat squeezes out a tear from swollen fountains,
and in the cathedral-oaks between the petrified branches
the angels have woven their nests in taut gilt leaves,
where more alive than the vine, transparent and warm-loving
the marble burgeons winding itself round space.
I want to go with you to a city where the world was full
of the milk of faltering
speech, where the moist echo is around,
where the arena is empty, but in striped shadows, like a tiger,
under the bridges the yellow, glossy Tiber purrs,
where neither ice nor snowdrift cover the swimming steps.
We will arrive together in the city, in a crown of dill and myrtle.
It will look at us, who are wounded, from under its slow eyelids.
It will give us the thumbs down – or perhaps up.

- Tatiana Voltskaya, I want to go with you to the city with a name short as life, trans. Richard McKane, Modern Poetry in Translation, no. 20