all hover and hammer

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.

It was all leaf-life and star-shower, unerring, self shattering power,

And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?

What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,

All  hover and hammer,

Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

It is now. It is not.

Written on May 4 1937, from Stolen Air, a book of poems by the Russian, Mandelstam, selected and translated by Christian Wiman, 2012. This was one of the last poems written by Mandelstam.

Through his poetry  and essays Mandelstam was increasingly critical of the Stalin government. He wrote and conducted private readings of his poem 'Stalin Epigram' during 1933.  This led to his arrest in 1934 by Stalin's henchmen. He was sent into internal exile with his wife.
After a suicide attempt by Mandelstam his exile was modified to ban only the big cities so they settled in Voronezh. By 1937 his work was being discredited again and he was arrested in May 1938. This time he was sentenced to five years in a correction camp and sent to a camp near Vladivostok. He died on December 27 1938 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
In 1956 he was partially exonerated, and in 1987 he was fully exonerated of all charges against him by the Gorbachev government. 

(The birds above were clamorous, keenly feasting on the nectar rich flowers.) 

I saw a tree

Incurable and unbelieving

in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree

rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get

to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined

or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion

beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood

exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)

and though a man's might now endow

even a tree with some excess

of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.

And that is where the joy came in.

by Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing