Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Poems

LERMONTOV IN TIFLIS

Still in love with the nine year old he’d been denied, Lermontov fell in love with the mountains instead. He sat by the Kura River writing love songs disguised as sonnets. In his pocket his father’s sword; in the other a lock of a married woman’s hair— Countess Emilia’s—

whom he also never held. But he painted many faces in the landscape and wasn’t ready to die. He was only seventeen, kept Byron concealed in his bed, and loved the cherries that emerged that May.

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