2025-09-07 - Perfection by Yevgeny Yevtushenko ============================================== Perseverance by Sana Arjumand The wind blows gently, fresh and cool. The porch is fragrant with damp pine. A duck stretches its wings wide, having just laid its egg. And it looks like a faultless girl, having laid in God's design, a perfection of white roundness on an altar of straw. And above the muddy, thawing road, above the moldering roofs of the huts, the perfection of the disc of fire rises slowly in the sky. The perfection of the woods in spring all shot through by the dawn, almost disembodied, shimmers in mist like the breath of the earth, all over the earth. Not in the frantic shapes of new fashions, not in shapes borrowed from others-- perfection is simply being natural, perfection is the breath of the earth. Don't torment yourself that art is secondary, destined only to reflect, that it remains so limited and lean, compared with nature itself. Without acting a part look to yourself for the source of art, and quietly and uniquely reproduce yourself just as you are. Be reflected, as a creature of nature bending over a well draws the reflection of its face up from the ice-ringed depths. author: Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 1933-2017 detail: tags: poem Tags ==== poem