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At Lenin's Tomb, Moscow, 1, A Smug Bolshevik Holds Forth
Rest easy, Comrade, your Party still rules;
we stallions lead the pack of working mules;
we are the movers, and the rest are tools.
And yet, we hang around this place like ghouls,
while we gun down our enemies---damned fools
whose lives are cheap, frayed threads yanked from warped spools.
In massive concrete basins, shed blood pools.
Death, not life, calls us to maintain the lies
hatched---Lenin's Works---out of your bulbous head,
so that these credulous are still mislead
to think your vengeful vision constitutes
the everlasting Workers' Paradise,
maintained by rifles, torture, and jackboots.
Starward
A not-so-fond farewell to the
A not-so-fond farewell to the red menace that begins, before the first word is read, with the color of blood and screams (Yes, red has a sound).
I took great pleasure in this brilliant rebuke at the grave where relics of the past still cling to a molding ideology. This line explodes:
"whose lives are cheap, frayed threads yanked from warped spools."
You aimed and fired with triumphant wit, and what a clever choice to deny the old corpse the dignity of a formal, metrical sonnet.
Excellent work!
You were kind enough not to
You were kind enough not to mention the inappropriate word, "proud," in the title. I have changed it to "smug," more befitting to the content of the poem.
Starward
Thank you for validating an
Thank you for validating an opinion I have had for a long time, that red screams. And I loved your phrase, "molding ideology." At the moment, that ideology is far less intact than Lenin is. However, I once saw an editorial cartoon, decades ago, but so horrifying I have never forgotten it, although I now could not be able to find it (and am glad I cannot). It depicted Lenin creeping from his tomb as a resuscitated Communism; and the look that was drawn on his face was so sinister, so terrifying, and, if I may use the word, demonic, that I threw the paper away before I had finished reading the news. I don't know if you ever watched whas broadcast as the first episode of a triology that Rod Serling called Night Gallery, and which became the series. It featured a painting of a cemetery which showed a dead man climbing from his grave. As terrifying as those paints were, the editorial cartoon of Lenin was worse.
And, I am still grinning broadly (so broadly I think the other residents in my home think I am up to something---maybe waiting for Norfolk Southern's stock to nose-dive, so I can afford some) at your phrase, your tremendously magnificent phrase, "to deny the old corpse." That is one for the quotations books, and deserves to join all those other magnificent phrases that are a staple and a glory of your Poetic accomplishment.
Starward