Song to the Red Army on Its Arrival at the Gates of Prussia

This is the song between night and dawn, this is the song come from the last death rattles as if from the beaten hide of a bloody drum, burst forth from the first joys like the flowering bough in the snow and like the ray of sunlight upon the flowering bough.

These are the words that clutched the dying and that syllable by syllable squeezed the tears like soiled clothes until they dried up the last bitter drops of sobbing and made from all the weeping the hardened braid, the cord, the hard thread that will uphold the dawn.