Friday, January 7, 2022

Osip Mandelstam

Poet Osip Mandelstam, left, and writer Nadezhda, right, suffered persecution, exile and tragedy at the hands of the Stalinist authorities.

Stalin

We live. We are not sure our land is under us.
Ten feet away, no one hears us.

But wherever there’s even a half-conversation,
we remember the Kremlin’s mountaineer.

His thick fingers are fat as worms,
his words reliable as ten-pound weights.

His boot tops shine,
his cockroach mustache is laughing.

About him, the great, his thin-necked, drained advisors.
He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him.

They make touching and funny animal sounds.
He alone talks Russian.

One after another, his sentences hit like horseshoes! He
pounds them out. He always hits the nail, the balls.

After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman,

putting a raspberry in his mouth 

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