 'For most of my life I wrote little poetry and submitted none, having taken Tolstoy's pronouncement to heart that one should resist writing unless one absolutely can no longer bear not to write. Seven years ago I reached that point. Having come to this country from Ukraine at the age of nine, I naturally took many of my themes from the horrors of twentieth century Eastern Europe as reflected briefly in my life and not so briefly in the life of my parents.' - Askold Skalsky 1The reference is to the height of the Stalinist terror in the USSR; the phrase is from Marx: "from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom."
|
'Before our century, there was probably no epoch in human history in which so many people were exposed to such an avalanche of utterly shattering facts.' —Stanislaw Baranczak
We are coming to terms
with what has been revealed,
what has been recorded,
unearthed--enormities,
ancient cadavers, skin,
barrows of human loam,
spools of entrails,
inseparable from the earth,
hectic arsenals of warm dirt
carpeted with lime and stiff
carbons of the long dead
when people tried to believe,
when they gazed on portraits
of a face set in a sequestered stare,
the involute tears rising from
their wrinkled hearts in
the steadfast incomprehensibility
of thick haunches and baggy pants,
unable to stop him or escape,
who, as popular wisdom said,
must have had an exceptional intellect
because he lacked the gift
of ordinary mercy.
The archives, the vast scale
and countless fleshes of those years,
fault lines of warm bodies
hardening inside their pits--
How to explain the toll,
the desolation?
He took everything personally,
even in those summer homes
with polished floors kept everlastingly ready,
too many even for him to sleep in,
yet waiting, empty and in state,
for the entourage of dark sedans,
enamel snouts by the baths of Sukhumi
or the purple clusters on Lake Ritsa
ringed by tall lindens and spring-fed ponds,
never a skeleton hand emerging from the waters
while ordinary people lived in their shacks
near the hothouses with cucumbers
and currant bushes and slim nannies
to teach the children of officials
their Caucasian twirls.
And what about Pitsunda Bay
and the ancient pines near Gagry
where they unrolled a red carpet once
over the sand for the Great Henchman himself,
overfed and slightly irritated
by one cracked tile but able to walk
straight from his motorboat
into the house behind the high stone fence
and dip in the pool under glass walls
unobserved by the bright incongruous features
of the dead.
We are coming to terms:
we have our algebra of needs,
our cognitive voids,
our relatively common anomalies.
Was it a heroic mission,
the towering belief in oneself,
the frightful prod to enter
the kingdom of sufficiency?
Was it for speeches
with annotated margins
marked "thundering ovation"
so that whole halls of delegates
and grandees from the West
rose to clap out of their leathered seats,
marveling at the sacrifice,
the paradigmatic leaps over the spines
of millions of drudges starving
on the richest patch of dirt
that ever felt its backside open to a plow?
How could this be,
these ruthless versions of reality
struck from above
by midnight knocks on the door
and a pistol crack through the head?
That was better maybe
than the second floor of Lyubyanka
and its wide office and special coverlets
that kept the carpet from bespatterings
when the interrogator beat the prisoners
with his stick.
But you can know nothing, they say,
those who still remember the autumns
golden with blood and unseen groans,
the endless droning of the trucks
about which no one dared to ask
in the secret registry of village names.
You can know nothing
of those times and those
who perished just from one directive
with a misspelled word.
We are coming to terms
even with a single grave sealed
by the State, fearless organ of history
coiled through long rows of living skulls
in fur caps and bewildered eyes
waiting to slump into open ditches
with their bones.
Think of it this way:
Pick any number between three and ten,
then add to it six zeroes.