Original
Любил
Девчонка, я тебя любил,Й домой не раз к тебе звонил,Не раз с тобою я встречался,Но так и не поцеловался.
Я тебя любил, я тебе звонил,На День рождения цветы тебе я подарил,Я о тебе мечтал, и повсюду вспоминал,Но вот пришел любви финал.
Ушла любовь - увяли розы,На небе прогремели грозы,Мы разошлись с тобою - понимаю,Но первую встречу иногда вспоминаю.
Translation
I Loved
Girl, I loved you — yes, I did;I rang your home, and not just once;I met with you, and more than once,but never got to kiss you.
I loved you, and I called you up,I gave you flowers on your birthday,I dreamed of you, and thought of you everywhere —but then it came: the end of love.
Love left — the roses withered, dried,and thunder rolled across the sky;we've parted, you and I — I know,but sometimes I recall the day we met.
About the poem
The same girl, the same telephone, one tense later. He called, met her, brought birthday flowers, never kissed her — “and then came love’s finale.” Roses wilt, thunder rolls, “you did not understand me,” the heart ached and grew quiet. Read beside I Love, this is the second panel of a diptych: present and past of one small story, told without ornament, ending in the flat honesty of “I no longer want to love you.” The shift in tense is devastating because almost nothing else has changed. The same gestures that once promised a beginning—calls, meetings, flowers—now survive only as evidence. The poem understands heartbreak as grammar: one small change in time alters the meaning of an entire emotional world.