The Wind Drove the Pages Wild - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Wind Drove the Pages Wild

 

Reading Yevtushenko on a Windy Day

 

The flapping, fluttering pages went wild in the wind

And poetry sometimes should go wild, blow wild

To shake those gently slumbering words awake

Provoking peaceful musings into a storm

 

Nouns chasing verbs into logical conclusions

That turn about and bite the reader in the (hand)

And adjectives torment the symbolism

While adverbs, as always, were mostly in the way

 

I just wanted a quiet hour with coffee and verse

But flapping, fluttering pages went wild in the wind

Yevgeny Yevtushenko - A Memorial (repost)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.

At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. But I really like him.

All Change at Zima Junction

For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017

Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer

And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what you are doing back here

And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction

“I went, and I am still going.”1


1Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962

But Yevtushenko Might Corrupt Our Jailers - a tribute to Penguin paperbacks

Lawrence Hall
mhall46194@aol.com

But Yevtushenko Might Corrupt Our Jailers

A tribute to Penguin paperbacks

When they
Someday
Take us away
For reading
For thinking
For writing

Those Penguin paperbacks all tattered and taped
Discovered when they empty our pockets
          will
Be used against us in their courts of law

But Yevtushenko might corrupt our jailers




17 July is Yevtushenko's birthday (1932)