A riddled sapper never set the charges:
the cry of birches is a wife’s or daughter’s.
Ilya Ehrenburg had opened the locks
in January nineteen-forty-five.
Mute as the dead are the raped left alive.
Now only splendid architecture talks.
The skeletons of quays rust in the spring,
their wooden floor beds long since warped and rotten.
Thorn and thistle prosper on the shore.
The opening ceremony with Hess forgotten,
the hammer and the sickle crush and sting
like history writ by those who won the war.
your father’s chin. Spurn, curse the Moor.Muhammad, scornful to the core,dreams of a Euro Paradisewhen you kneel down to feed the poor.Stupidity is not a cure.Look at the anger in their eyes,hate in their mouths. Spurn, curse the Moor.The haughty Mullah can say more,on the blond beach, a lord of flies,when you kneel down to…
And for a moment he truly seesthe vision gasping beyond his prayer.What multifarious light of dawnas seagulls snatch and lift up his eyeslike hosts on the altar of the worldto the insouciance of the Lord.What paradise of blinded kittens,what heaven of flotsam washed ashore,and Gabriel radiant in the sunamid an army of idiots—before the vision…
Rats in a stable are not horses.(How well he knew their beady eyes,steaming sewers and twisted knives!)The pamphlets are medals on his chest,pearls of truth upon his canon,while the gnawed brown beams of Europecrumble in the metro slumsand France relents once more, and burns.
A dark grease from the time of the last Tsarrests deep within the wood of sunken ties.The platform’s still, the station name in boldGothic letters. No pale mothers rushtheir children to the last departing carwith brusque farewells forever in their eyes.The car rusts at the edge. Has been there sincethe day the Soviets sacked the…
the thistles and the apples bountiful.Praised be the frozen branches in the pass,the rapids rushing downwards to the spring,the violets sprouting in the morning light.Praised be the feather of the broken wing,the wounded fawn that will not last the nightwhose heavy clouds obstruct the moon and stars.Praised be the hungry lynx and its last prey,the…
daddy so tall, holding the frightened thing,head on the block just as the hatchet flies,falling… fallen by the empty pen,taking the longest count, as red wings rise,free at last, and we are saved again.
