People -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Guest poem submitted by Rama Rao:

(Poem #1561) People No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet. And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity obscurity is not uninteresting. To each his world is private, and in that world one excellent minute. And in that world one tragic minute. These are private. In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. There are left books and bridges and painted canvas and machinery. Whose fate is to survive. But what has gone is also not nothing: by the rule of the game something has gone. Not people die but worlds die in them. -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In this world of heroic biographies there are relatively few homages to the
"average" man. After Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard", the only
other one I have come across is this fine poem by Yevtushenko. The last line
sums it up: "worlds die in them ."  Yevtushenko is already in the Minstrels'
collection. His "Courage" is another of my favourites.

Rama Rao.