We live without sensing the country beneath us,
At ten paces, our speech has no sound
And when there's the will to half-open our mouths
The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way.
Fat fingers as oily as maggots,
Words sure as forty-pound weights,
With his leather-clad gleaming calves,
and his large laughing cockroach eyes.

And around him a rabble of thin-necked bosses,
He toys with the service of such semi-humans.
They whistle, they meouw, and they whine:
He alone merely jabs with his finger and barks,
Tossing out decree after decree like horseshoes—
Right in the eyes, in the face, the brow or the groin.
Not one shooting but swells his gang's pleasure,
And the broad breast of the Ossetian.