Russians

I cower from the Moscow avenues,

Crushed by their gargantuan breadth,

Murderous traffic speeding towards me.

“Two Romes have fallen,and the third stands,

And a fourth there shall not be.”

Fateful August raises a dangerous sun.

In the underpass a shabby busker

Plays a mournful ballad,

The same song every day.



People walk around St Petersburg,

Talking to themselves,

Muttering,grumbling,groaning to themselves,

Disconsolate and all-too-human,

Hugging their sorrows close.



A dusty little town on the Volga.

One remembers the Germans lured out here

By Catherine the Great

With promises of fertile lands, houses and livestock,

And they came, they came in their thousands,

Excited pioneers of a new European civilisation,

Only to find nothing, nothing but the steppe,

And the spears of Tatar raiders.

In her decaying flat, Vera lives with hunchbacked thoughts,

Eating black bread with them,

Sharing her vodka with them,

The forest demons who must be appeased.

She walks down by the willow river

Through the floating poplar seeds,

And catches the yellwgreen flame of an oriole’s flight

On her fingertips,

Balances the plash of a swimming rat

On the end of her nose.

Wary and defiant, her dark eyes

Sometimes fire with amusement and joy.

The past is bad medicine,

So bitter, so foul.



Who knows how to be free?

Slavery is so familiar, it seems right.

Who knows how to make a new beginning

When endings are all we ever had.

Somewere,perhaps,a few true souls are gathered

Like the last colony of Old Believers,

Hidden in some remote Siberian forest,

Praying for the world.



Siberian summer evening.

Dust-tracks covered with apple blossom.

Outside a house once inhabited by a Decembrist

An apple tree surges up in full bloom.

What will the New Jerusalem look like?

Will it be a village of wooden huts

Where the men and women bathe naked together

In a river of laughing fish?

Slowly, suddenly, a wind stirs and rises

Far away, and gusts through the trees,

Shedding its riches of rain.