Can You Describe This? - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

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Can You Describe This?

 

-Anna Ahkmatova, Requiem

 

Supplicants waiting in long lines in the snow

Hoping to give their children some sense of truth

Among the gassings of electronic screens

Protestors and federals bellowing in turn

 

The news blows in as Siberian flurries

Some flailing this way, and some trailing that

Footprints disappear among the drifts

Rasputin’s body might float up in the spring

 

Describe each human as a number, as a stat

“Truth?” sneered Pontius Pilate, “now what is that?”

 

“Can you describe this?” a woman asked Ahkmatova

 

“Yes, I can,” she spoke, she wrote, she lived

The Stray 'Possum Cafe - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

The Stray ‘Possum Café

 

The only comparisons in Western literature might be with the Romantics or the Beat Generation, but the Russian Silver Age poets outdazzled them in glamour and intrigue.

 

-Darran Anderson

 

 

We lay our scene not in Saint Petersburg

Where Anna Ahkmatova flirted and rhymed

With Gumilyov, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva

Among champagne, cigarettes, tears, and pearls

 

In the old and storied Stray Dog Café 

But in a field on a December night

Where two opossums meet in quest of love

And wrangle in the leaves of intimacy

 

Poor strays making…art…without any fear

Of execution by the Kremlin Mountaineer

 

 

Saint Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café was a matrix for art, music, dance, and poetry from imperial Russia to the Soviet horror, and thence into the world.  It almost serves as a sort of hinge between the 19^th century and the 20^th. Please read Darran Anderson’s professional and thus accessible article in City Journal: Anna Akhmatova’s Bravery.

 

I am having fun with intruding ‘possums among the Silver Age poets, but as for them, yes, they are essential. Their brilliance still shines for us and influences what we write even if we are unaware of them – and for that most of them were murdered by the mad tyranny of Communism.