The Murmur of the Flowers
...And as I wandered among the graves of flowers, I thought I heard the silent mourning of their souls...
“Happily we grew, blooming many-hued and delicately fragrant; breathing all around us the sweetest, most intoxicating smells...
“With heads held high, we proudly smiled at the blue sky and the yellow sun sowing radiant seeds of life...
“Widely we unfolded our petals when the silver-pink sunlight kissed us...
“Artists came to us, promising to immortalize our lives upon the canvas. Keenly did they feel our desire to remain young, to never wilt, to live forever, filling the air with our perfumes, growing happily... And they, as if endeavouring to compensate us for our cruel and inevitable deaths, took pains to prolong our outward appearances, at least before the eyes of men; and desiring themselves to live forever, to never die, they drank our earthly beauty...
“Workers stopped before us. With joyless eyes, speaking wordlessly of want and worry, of need and insult, of treacherous thoughts and unrealized dreams, they inhaled our exhalations; and in those eyes there glimmered a flicker of thirst—not for wealth and glory—but for flowers. And we watched as their small sunken chests inhaled more fully, broadly, deeply, as if they were attempting to inhale life itself. But they could not stop long before us, for some cruel being was driving them ever onward with its invisible whip, shouting ‘Faster!’ So letting out a sigh, they went away with sad, slow steps, as if they were attempting to provision themselves with our breath, to drink it in the depths of the dusty, smokey, fetid factories where they toiled...
“Beautiful girls came to us also—young flowers they were, like us; and giving into their sweet and youthful fantasies, threw to us looks from their divinely innocent eyes, in which was reflected the fathomless hues of the rainbow...
“And a wave of warm, bright-red human blood showered down on us, and in that blood did we drown... It was the blood of workers who had dreamed fervently of bread and freedom, of the day when they too would be allowed to inhale the smells of flowers, peaceful days and love. It was the blood of young girls who had dreamed of a life without sweatshops, of love without transactions... Somebody feared the realization of their dreams, the dreams of the oppressed... So they issued orders for massacres, bloody, cruel and heartless acts of butchery...
“And men trampled over us. In the boots of soldiers and policemen, they stepped on our naked hearts... We begged. We wept. We asked them, ‘Of what are we guilty? Of pining for the sun?’ But they gave us no answer. And we convulsed under their feet. But nobody minded. Instead, they mocked us when we poured out our hearts full of grief...
“And we begged them, ‘Give us one drop of dew, we are suffocating!’ But nobody minded. Instead, they stepped on us, again and again—we, who only wanted to dream of blue skies and singing nightingales—they pressed us into the mud...
“And who will tell us our crime? And who will answer the question:
“‘Why?’
“And evil men came to us with sharp metal scythes in their heartless hands, and they cut us down while we were still young, before we could even multiply, before vigorous bees and colourful butterflies could come suck our nectar... We had simply been preparing ourselves for a happy life: to send our perfumes skywards, into the great temple of the universe...
“And they gave us to the horses, pigs and asses...
“And the frost killed us also. Too early did we bloom; too early did we come forth to celebrate the glorious spring... We had hoped the sun would be bright and warm. We believed in the blue sky; we believed in the charms of intoxicating sunlight promising freedom and happiness... We believed... We hoped... We came forth... But we were mistaken. We were deceived. For beyond the glimmering horizon lurked innumerable ranks of black and thunderous clouds!
“And we issued among nettles. Pale did we grow, and pale did we blossom. Thin, sharp thorns, like sewing needles, pierced our innocent petals and covered us with wounds. Wild grasses suffocated us. Dry limbs of fruitless nettles blocked our path to the sun...
“And thirst made us shrivel. We begged humbly for one drop of water. But we were consumed and wilted without ever tasting the life-giving dew!
“And we wilted in darkness, and vain were our prayers for but one ray of sunlight!
“And they covered us with filth when we dared lift our heads but one inch higher than the spikes of the grasses...
“And we decorated the chests of men, which were, in fact, the nests of serpents...
“And they tore us from the ground and incarcerated us in foreign places... And always did we sigh for the joy that was ours in the fields of our parents and grandparents...
“And we glimmered in the costly vases of lavish salons, while in the half-lit garrets of lonely poets, there bloomed only mildew.
“And they...
“And we...
“And they...”
And countless were the groans of the innumerable oppressed hearts, hearts of the perished flowers, all of whom wanted only to live. They came at me from every side:
“Why can’t we live?”
“Why must we die?”
And as I wandered among the graves of flowers, I thought long and hard about the life of man, and his fate.
I thought: Someday I too will wilt...forever. But I shall not weep, for I know that while flowers cannot change their fate, man can. For nothing will stop his genius on the road to victory over every blind element of nature which presently rules and enslaves him. Indeed, I now see the dawn of a new life that will triumph over death, when the rebellion of man’s consciousness, refusing the lies of death, will begin a great battle against social slavery; and having realized his freedom, will begin a new battle to banish all other kinds of slavery from the face of the earth.
And as I wandered among the graves of flowers, I thought about the triumph of life.
Written by Illya Izgur | Translated by Adam Kuplowsky
’Murmuro de Floroj (Poemo en prozo')’, Proleta kurso de esperanto, v.5, pp. 147-152
Originally written in Russian in 1919.
Illya Izgur (1881-1937): Born in Berezina, Belarus, to a family of Jewish bakers. In 1903, at the encouragement of the Yiddish writer Avrom Rejzen, he began to write and publish poetry in Yiddish and Belarusian, and later Russian and Ukrainian. Around this time, he learned Esperanto, and became an active member of the international Esperanto community. After several transient years in Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland, he finally settled in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, where he took part in revolutionary activities, and supported the creation of a Ukrainian Socialist Republic. In 1936, he was arrested by the Stalinist regime on the suspicion of writing Trotskyist, anti-Soviet literature, and was executed by a firing squad the following year.