Happiness Is Not a Tended Rose

By Dimitri Shostakovich

Happiness is not a tended rose

Amid the prescient beauty of a garden:

Perhaps one senses soon some gate may close;

Perhaps one senses soon the earth will harden.

Years come and go like waves upon a shore,

Violent or peaceful with the wind.

After one has given up on more,

Love waits within the heart, its passion thinned.

Even in a passage void of light,

Nether windings black with rage and grief,

There are waters sweet with lost delight

In which one finds a strong, serene belief.

No happiness can overcome life's pain

Except one love, and love give life again.