Requiem of the Бabushkas
I
After the revolution
Cherry and rose woven into challis
Worn thin with walking away.
Behind, the city wrapped in smoke.
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?*
II
The years before
The trackless woods* of prisoners
Frozen. A babushka talking
To herself: what is in store for the day.
III
Waking from Stalin.
From Hitler’s Ukrainian dream
The scent of tall pines
Breathing another spring.
Valentyna walking to the smokehouse,
‘Today I command the parade,’ she says.
IV
The past lies there
Cencium, strontium, plutonium
Behind a slaughtered pig and
Wild boars in the vegetable garden.
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.*
V
Red brick needles
Give ground to new pines
A lynx just there behind
A single rabbit.
Chickens skirt the yard.
Dancing like lovers
To a secret chorus.
Maria tilling, hoe to earth.
Someone small has made up his mind to live
Has turned green - tomorrow, fluffed up.
In the Red Forest, chiffchaffs,
Blackcaps, barn swallows
Bumblebees, butterflies. Pigs
Feast on mushrooms and truffles.
A falcon, large and gray
Chest puffed and wings outspread
Hangs beaten with a stick
Hanna says: ‘He came and ate my chicken.’
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.*
A severed sow’s head bleeds into the snow,
Its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky.
Hanna lifting a glass of currant wine,
‘So long, brains. See you afterward.’
a remix, italicized from:
Anna Akhmatov, Everything is Plundered
You led me into the trackless woods,/My falling stars, my dark endeavor.
*quotes from documentary: Babushkas of Chernobyl
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