#title You shoot at yourself, America
#author Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#SORTauthors Yevgeny Yevtushenko;
#date 1968
#source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/56-june-19-july-1-1968/you-shoot-at-yourself-america]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2018-04-06
#notes Fifth Estate #56, June 19-July 1, 1968

The color of the Statue of Liberty

Grows ever more deathly pale

As, loving freedom with bullets

You shoot at yourself, America.

You can kill yourself this way!

It is dangerous to go out

Into this hellish world,

But it is still more dangerous

To hide in the bushes

There is a smell on earth of a universal

Dallas,

It is frightful to live

And this fright is shameful

Who is going to believe hypocritical fairy tales,

When, behind a facade of noble ideas

The price of revolver lubricant rises

And the price of human life falls?

Murder attend funerals dressed in mourning,

And later become stockholders,

And, once again,

Ears of grain filled with bullets

Wave in the fields of Texas.

The eyes of murderers peer out alike from under hats and caps

The steps of murderers are heard at all doorways

And a second for the Kennedys falls...

America, save your children!

Just like your

Bill of Rights

You promised to the conscience of the world,

But, at the brink of bottomless shame,

The children of other countries turn gray.

And their huts.

Bombed in the night.

Burn in your fire,

You are shooting not at King,

But at your own conscience.

You are bombing Vietpam,

And with this your own honor.

When a nation is going dangerously insane,

It cannot be cured of its troubles

By hastily prescribed

Calm.

Perhaps the only help is shame,

History cannot be cleansed in a laundry

There are no such washing machines

Blood can never be washed away!

O, where is it hiding, the shame of a nation,

As if it were a runaway Negro?

The slaves are within the slaves.

There are many unfettered murderers.

They carry out their mob justice,

Pogroms.

And Raskolnikov wanders through America

Insane.

With a bloody ax.

Hey, Old Abe

What are people doing,

Understanding vilely only one truth,

That the greatness of a tree

Can be assessed only after it is felled

Lincoln basks in his marble chair,

Wounded.

They are shooting at him again!

What beasts.

The stars

In your flag,

America,

Are like bullet holes.

Arise from the dead,

Bullet-pierced Statue of Liberty

Murdered so many times,

And speak out like a woman and mother

And curse the freedom to kill.

But without wiping the splashes

of blood from your forehead

You, Statue of Liberty, have raised up

Your green, drowned woman’s face,

Appealing to the heavens against being trodden under foot.