Mack
Hall, HSG
Upon Reading Doctor Zhivago
Love
lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold,
grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A
thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium
of a martyred civilization.
A
silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The
rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung
casually between its pale pink jaws -
A
cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above
the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A
dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It
gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises
from the clotted, haunted earth.
For
generations the seasons are lies,
Since
neither love nor life is free to sing
The
eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And
yet beneath the lies the old world gasps
The
old world gasps in sudden ecstasy
A
whispered resurrection of the truth
As
tender stems ascend and push the stones
Aside,
away into irrelevance.
And
now the sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like
merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing
an ox-team into the fields,
Showing
off their muscles to merry young girls.
The
men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring
the seams of broken drains,
As
useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned
up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For
this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over
those wide lands her church domes bless the sky,
While
Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With
the songs of lovers in God’s ever-spring.
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