They will not tell of what he lost and gave,
nor how he lived and was beloved by all
back in the little town from which he came,
nor how, inside a foxhole all alone,
he curled up like a fetus in the womb
when the sniper’s bullet called his name
and, like a judgment to be writ in stone,
found him neither cowardly nor brave.
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Oh, but a thought ago a baying hound
The stars tolled beyond the sombre cloudsand on the frozen pond the forest sighed.He knelt, his arrows whetted by a tear,the fire he’d set, rising into night.Eternity approached, and in its sphere,a sudden passing bird eclipsed the light.He aimed and freed an arrow into dark.Then maelstroms, downy plumes, snow tainted red,the pity of the moon:…
Open the doors of the dark,
that we might behold branchesripe with dew.We’ll wet our cracked lipswith cool unworldly water,and never cast a doubtor curse the unminding moon.Let the rutty road not burn,a worm not canker our cores,and wholehearted,we’ll follow like cherubim.Let our brows’ brinenot blind our vision,the pain from our soresnot sully our spirits,and we’ll saythe world’s not a whimor…
They’re gathered round, astonished, full of dread,
and who leaves those with whom he’s broken bread,and who comes like a stranger from outside.Old solitude haunts him, Gethsemane,though once it bound him to astounding acts;now he will walk through every olive tree,and those who love him turn away their backs.He’s called them to the table, past the stoves,and (like birds woken by shots…
The valley sinks into the mist;
eclipses the cornea of the sun;the ridge blooms purple on my wrist,fading, inimical and black.The earth exhales into the dusk,frost forming in the shaded huskof afterglows. My wine and sackmy only friends, I hear the callof hovering owls, as stars drift down.A hawk upon a bough, no townhigh or below, I wait for Fall.
I look down, see there’s a new bank
the summer of 1934.It was a place where Germans dranktheir märzen, pilsner, kölsch. The buzzof saws in their ears, they would lookout windows on the raised ground floor,at ducks on the canal, a rookatop a branch. The barges passedweighed down with lumber, coal, and steelon to the Oder railway line.They drank as long as moments…
I see your noble face behind barbed wire,
only by cold. The laughter of the liarwho put you there is still loud in your ears,although in far-off Moscow now—he’s seated,the hooked-nosed slayer of the highborn rich,sadist and defiler of Slavic daughters,egalitarian savant and snitch.Who do you think will recall the martyrs,the frightened faces and the countless tears,the forgotten dead of Russia and Ukraine?Who…