PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I am Bolshevik---committed, loyal---

for two decades.  I helped raise the Red Star

and cheered when our Party murdered the Czar,

and all his family.  I helped to despoil

the capitalist greed that clutched our land's

throat, strangling it between self-serving hands. 

And I regret admitting that I know

how this subverts the science taught by Marx

and Lenin.  But in this light's glare, our sparks

flash briefly, then burn out, small dying embers

as October's crimson, triumphant glow

is shadowed by the stark chill of November's

dismal arrival, and its ghastly vision

that I will try to set forth with precision.

As I walked slowly through a Kremlin hall,

thinking of all the Romanovs now slain

(and for their deaths, none of us shall bear guilt,

nor some old fashioned, judged immoral, stain;

look at the industry that we have built

upon their vast empire and in their stead---

great factories, solid as granite rocks,

painted in steel gray and Soviet Red;

and locomotives that will never stall),

I saw an adolescent, Georgian lad;

shoeless, shirtless; in baggy trousers clad,

and with them a pair of lavender socks.

I asked him his name:  he said, "Soselo;

"I am a poet; and, not long ago---

"the worst part of my nature murdered me

"with a metaphysical perfidy

"that was just more than merely cursory;

"and how within this shadowed palace thrives;

"and to destroy all its rivals, it strives---

"claiming each victim is an enemy

"of this mayhem you call a revolution.

"Death it imposes, in deluge---profusion---

"and carried out by a barbaric host.

"To nameless or mass graves, victims are banished,

"expelled from your Party, and memory

"of Russia---except the collating work

"of some minor, bored, bureacratic clerk;

"and in the Kremlin corridors now mourned

"only by me, a rather paltry ghost,

"whose poems are now by Party dictate scorned;

"a dictate promulgated by the very

"observant, astute, General Secretary,

"of whose past I was once a major part.

"In seminary, he---it---was repressed;

"but from my Orthodox Faith, it obsessed

"to find escape; and then was snagged and caught,

"or to use a much better word, possessed

"in webs spun by arachnid Lenin's thought;

"and thus became a bloody juggernaut,

"a crafty mind bereft of soul and heart."

And then, with a most poignant, sorrowing, look,

this lovely, eloquent young man's ghost vanished,

before my sight with a dismissive motion.

What I say here will never be preserved

in an official article, or book---

that, like most of ours, never leaves its shelf;

a destiny all of them have deserved.

Considering all this politically

(or, as we might say, "communistically",

bringing me to a craven consternation)

I understand what it suggests about

the fervor of my Leninist devotion

(which, I believed once, no one could revile).

I do not want to be put on "show trial"

in Moscow (ultimate humiliation,

followed by expedited execution,f

of the proscribed---prescribed, foregone, conclusion),

I think I would prefer to kill myself;

and, with this pistol, blow my brains right out.

Starward