"Lenin in his tomb is white and weary. Before the world exploded into shards His voice was the bull-roarer, and it soared In waking syllables above the dreaming dead. 5 Life's green branch is snapped above the boulevard Where we march shouting, and the stick Is in our hands whose slurring fire flamed The Kremlin's egg-shell spires back to ash. The ruling house is rubble rucked with tars; 10 Tsars' bones cluck where dinosaur skeletons are. Smooth-skulled tanks from one-eyed turrets stare And move out like mastodons from their simple pits of ice, Rolling up the capitol with a wish to kill and eat The man-shaped offspring that teethed on mother-meat. 15 It is incessant springtime now, and a rash Of bursting apples cracks the wintered bough Stunned by expectation and by prophesies; When I resigned Gorbachev to his statesman's fate, Telling off the congress with a blue face, 20 What, love, rattled to the empty chute? Now we saunter and talk by the renewing river That sighs and shifts and corkscrews through Gorky Park Where the ferriswheel is shivering to its height And Moscow skaters wobble new-foaled, released 25 From their eternal moment when Stalin stopped the stream, His mustache powdering like a giant Jack Frost pleased To see his humid hometown freezing into dream. Churches hold their quiver of new crosses up to light. Marooned in the humming populace of the Platz, larks 30 Disperse with the bright bells beating like a gun; By starred asters starred children lamb and race Past buoyed parents walking, and cannot wait To see themselves staring up from the water's face. Dripping workers grown cold in soldered light 35 Rivet the future's extinction together bolt by bolt... The Comintern's cragging inmates stare and scream Like storks in pilgrim plumage from their bobwire nest Topping the charring stacks; how long will stapled feathers stick? When the atom bomb blisters and their faces melt 40 Before the torn waters of the burning lake What will rise in ecstatic showers to dissipate?"
From the collection "XXX Sonnets"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.