And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
    Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
    It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
    And it was all aimed at me.

    What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
    What is being? What is truth?

    Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
    All hover and hammer,
    Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
    It is now. It is not.                                               
    (4 May 1937)

 --Osip Mandelstam, trans. Christian Wiman