Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Babi Yar

No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid.

Today I am as old in years

as all the Jewish people.

Now I seem to be

a Jew.

Here I plod through ancient Egypt.

Here I perish crucified, on the cross,

and to this day I bear the scars of nails.

I seem to be

Dreyfus.

The Philistine

is both informer and judge.

I am behind bars.

Beset on every side.

Hounded,

spat on,

slandered.

Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace

stick their parasols into my face.

I seem to be then

a young boy in Byelostok.

Blood runs, spilling over the floors.

The barroom rabble-rousers

give off a stench of vodka and onion.

A boot kicks me aside, helpless.

In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.

While they jeer and shout,

"Beat the Yids. Save Russia!"

some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.

0 my Russian people!

I know

you

are international to the core.

But those with unclean hands

have often made a jingle of your purest name.

I know the goodness of my land.

How vile these anti-Semites-

without a qualm

they pompously called themselves

the Union of the Russian People!

I seem to be

Anne Frank

transparent

as a branch in April.

And I love.

And have no need of phrases.

My need

is that we gaze into each other.

How little we can see

or smell!

We are denied the leaves,

we are denied the sky.

Yet we can do so much --

tenderly

embrace each other in a darkened room.

They're coming here?

Be not afraid. Those are the booming

sounds of spring:

spring is coming here.

Come then to me.

Quick, give me your lips.

Are they smashing down the door?

No, it's the ice breaking ...

The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.

The trees look ominous,

like judges.

Here all things scream silently,

and, baring my head,

slowly I feel myself

turning gray.

And I myself

am one massive, soundless scream

above the thousand thousand buried here.

I am

each old man

here shot dead.

I am

every child

here shot dead.

Nothing in me

shall ever forget!

The "Internationale," let it

thunder

when the last anti-Semite on earth

is buried forever.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood.

In their callous rage, all anti-Semites

must hate me now as a Jew.

For that reason

I am a true Russian!

Le Coq

Waving his floppy red crown
and boasting, a broad golden chest,
he paraded his intent to make more of himself.
But she stuck him with a needle
before he could act.

Beak down and wings spread out,
blood found its way back to the gutter
and down to the fields where the women dig,
in the soil as black as my grandmothers
once painted their teeth.

The flaccid neck droops off the edge
of the round cedar platter, and
the golden chest is dull and still.
Deceptive feathers, piled high somewhere,
make for stuffing where we had none.

His sound is no more in our ears,
screeching at dawn toward the east.
Take his head and his crest to the forest,
where the bear wakes.

Identity

Jean-Marc rose to get the bottle of cognac and two glasses. Then, after swallowing a mouthful: "At the end of my hospital visit, he began to reminisce. He reminded me what I must have said when I was sixteen. When he did that, I understood the sole meaning of friendship as it's practiced today. Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it."

Milan Kundera, Identity

Lugano, Autumn

Streets lined straight with silver coins

turn men to decorated rats

in our glittering capital of Hamlin.

Sprinklings from pricey powders
rest on the fur shoulders of grannies

without the potpourri pharmacy stink.

Young women grip the refined arms of Guido;

pets feigning balance as they strut and squawk

like exotic birds in mile-high stilettos.

I should snicker. I should be sick,

but I too lick the gaudy stockings

of Our Lady of Material Desires.

Sex and success hang off her skeletal frame.

Objects of beauty branded by commercial names:

this is you.

I have therefore I am.

Flicking tongues spit the flames of a more passionate language,

rolling "r"s over my choppy and guttural expressions

while a conflagration of envy and imitation

sweeps away my sense of another reality.

The pristine lakes and mountain villas,

spotless streets, plastic breasts and stone faces

mock me with their organized perfection,

maintained by lies of good in gold.

Isolated by more than mountains.

----

Thanks to Joe Amato.

Hoffnung:

You listened. But when I spoke, the thoughts I could express were not what I wanted you to hear. Carefully selected pauses in phrases with allusions to shared memories had been telling you all along. The pauses leaked into growing pools of silence that had their own meaning between us, for what could be louder than those spaces when the Gods speak? How often is the attempt at articulation only superfluous digression and the struggle for eloquence merely wasted clichés? How underestimated is the power of a glance? I valued subtlety and the elegance of brevity, and I knew you knew how to read between the lines. Then we began to sense the soundless interludes had become a pernicious gap in communication, a growing muted pleading for something more, a connection, which unheard became frustrated, violent and uncontrollable. What I thought was wordless comprehension was but hopeful endurance, wearing out. Front to front I thought my hands could link our thoughts, but sleeping back to back, expectations faltered that you could understand.
Now, alone waiting for dreams I wonder;
why would you speak to someone that way?

You drop a word here or there,
a statement or a question,
or maybe both or neither.
What fears worm back and through to eat
the development of what
you really meant to say
or meant to ask by saying
a thousand words that missed their mark.