Wednesday, March 2, 2022

A babushka talking To herself: what is in store for the day.

 


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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