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Lines From Somewhere In Medieval Russia
We murdered the village's man in chief;
then martyred that pesty Orthodox priest,
and burned down his church and melted the bell
for its brass for a statute of a great horse's ass---
that failed notary who led our revolution
(along with his horse-faced wife).
He promised that at the end of our strife,
our multitude of problems would pass
out of the controus of our collective life,
and everything would become well.
He promised us the ultimate relief
from our poverty, with enough---at least---
to eat. But to our confusion,
we could not create the villagers' paradise:
not on the foundation of his wishful lies.
Your poetry often reminds me
Your poetry often reminds me of what Boris Pasternak wrote in 1960:
"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades."
He would have applauded your unsparing indictment of a social experiment turned into a cruel, colossal failure. With the right touch of wit and searing reality, your poem is an excellent cautionary tale. Great one!
Thank you so very much for
Thank you so very much for that comment. I just tried to imagine Lenin's version of Marxism applied to a rural village rather than the entire Soviet Union. I think the results would be the same---regardless of the scale---because no good thing can be founded on wholesale murder..
Starward