Wednesday, January 31, 2018
A Russian Series, 9: The Fifth Karamazov - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox 1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ
When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now
Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines
Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are
But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina 2
Those Russian messengers 3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor 4 hermitage
1 Russian Orthodox
2 The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3 The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4 Poor only by secular standards
mhall46184@aol.com
The Fifth Karamazov
When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox 1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ
When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now
Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines
Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are
But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina 2
Those Russian messengers 3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor 4 hermitage
1 Russian Orthodox
2 The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3 The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4 Poor only by secular standards
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
A Russian Series, 8: "Withdrawn from Salem Public Library" - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
“Salem Public Library, East Main Street,
Salem, VA 24153”
A happy book, thought-stained, and often-read:
An anthology of Russian poetry
Salem, Virginia must be a marvelous town
A library stocked with poetry, and stocked
With poetry readers who have turned again
And again to favorite pages here and there
Long-ago poets murdered by the Soviets
But finding love at last in Salem, Virginia
Re:
20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Gold
Selected and with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward, editors
New York: Doubleday. 1993
mhall46184@aol.com
“Withdrawn from Salem Public Library”
Yevtushenko in a Used-Book Sale
“Salem Public Library, East Main Street,
Salem, VA 24153”
A happy book, thought-stained, and often-read:
An anthology of Russian poetry
Salem, Virginia must be a marvelous town
A library stocked with poetry, and stocked
With poetry readers who have turned again
And again to favorite pages here and there
Long-ago poets murdered by the Soviets
But finding love at last in Salem, Virginia
Re:
20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Gold
Selected and with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward, editors
New York: Doubleday. 1993
Monday, January 29, 2018
A Russian Series, 7: And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused
Perhaps the sound is pleasant to the ear
The concept that free men and women can choose
Wisely wise leaders wisely to lead them
Backwards, crashing the gates of Eden lost
And building there a world of perfect peace
No matter how many millions must die for it
And every strand of barbed wire is excused:
“Oh, well, at least we got rid of the Czar.”
The firing squads, the cries of dying children -
Perhaps those sounds are pleasant to the ear
mhall46184@aol.com
And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused
Perhaps the sound is pleasant to the ear
The concept that free men and women can choose
Wisely wise leaders wisely to lead them
Backwards, crashing the gates of Eden lost
And building there a world of perfect peace
No matter how many millions must die for it
And every strand of barbed wire is excused:
“Oh, well, at least we got rid of the Czar.”
The firing squads, the cries of dying children -
Perhaps those sounds are pleasant to the ear
Sunday, January 28, 2018
A Russian Series, 6: Did the Russians Hide Nukes in Your Sock Drawer? - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
The western sky is blue; the east is red
But try to put it right out of your head
If you find a Russian under your bed
Concealing a nuke that will kill you dead
The Intergossip surely must be right
So hit the keyboard now, and share the fright
On Social-Medium-Range all through the night
And type it really fast before…that
LIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ding-dong, the east is red, the west is blue
And rumors drift about, flake news, untrue
mhall46184@aol.com
Did the Russians Hide Nukes
in Your Sock Drawer?
The western sky is blue; the east is red
But try to put it right out of your head
If you find a Russian under your bed
Concealing a nuke that will kill you dead
The Intergossip surely must be right
So hit the keyboard now, and share the fright
On Social-Medium-Range all through the night
And type it really fast before…that
LIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ding-dong, the east is red, the west is blue
And rumors drift about, flake news, untrue
Saturday, January 27, 2018
A Russian Series, 5: If the Russians Find Out That the Iced Tea was Bugged...
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
If the Russians find out that the iced tea
Was bugged they may well conclude that Area 51
Has tested Tom Brady’s jersey which was stowed
In a bus station locker in Donetsk
With the claim check issued to Kellyanne Conway
And passed to a North Korean operative via
A secret drop in a hollow pumpkin
Behind a voting machine in Spokane
That was hacked by a rogue albino nun
Carrying secret numbers for Rand Paul
mhall46184@aol.com
If the Russians Find Out
That the Iced Tea was Bugged…
If the Russians find out that the iced tea
Was bugged they may well conclude that Area 51
Has tested Tom Brady’s jersey which was stowed
In a bus station locker in Donetsk
With the claim check issued to Kellyanne Conway
And passed to a North Korean operative via
A secret drop in a hollow pumpkin
Behind a voting machine in Spokane
That was hacked by a rogue albino nun
Carrying secret numbers for Rand Paul
The Grammys Celebrate Workers - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
With frosted breath, hands gloved against the cold
A working man forklifts the barricades
Into the streets, that he may block himself
From musical celebrations of work
Inside the temporary Palace of Culture
Musicians are being told what to wear
What they are for, and what they are against
Their speeches scrolled on discreet telescreens
The workers barred from work shiver and wait
For artists great, who never pay the freight
mhall46184@aol.com
The Grammys Celebrate Workers
“A forklift carrying barricades held up a crowd of commuters…”
-Los Angeles Times
With frosted breath, hands gloved against the cold
A working man forklifts the barricades
Into the streets, that he may block himself
From musical celebrations of work
Inside the temporary Palace of Culture
Musicians are being told what to wear
What they are for, and what they are against
Their speeches scrolled on discreet telescreens
The workers barred from work shiver and wait
For artists great, who never pay the freight
Friday, January 26, 2018
A Russian Series, 4: The Death of a Good and Faithful Spider - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
A good and faithful spider lived its life
In spinning and dusting and catching pests
In the ikon corner among the saints:
Kyril and Methodius, Seraphim
Tikhon the Wonderworker, Vladimir
Anna of Kashin, Nicholas the Czar
Zosima, Xenia of Saint Petersburg
And all the cloud of holy Slavic witness
Whose images were guarded worthily
By a little spider who served God well
mhall46184@aol.com
The Death of a Good and Faithful Spider
In Tod Mixson’s ikon corner a good and faithful spider fulfilled its vocation in an arachnid-life well spent.
A good and faithful spider lived its life
In spinning and dusting and catching pests
In the ikon corner among the saints:
Kyril and Methodius, Seraphim
Tikhon the Wonderworker, Vladimir
Anna of Kashin, Nicholas the Czar
Zosima, Xenia of Saint Petersburg
And all the cloud of holy Slavic witness
Whose images were guarded worthily
By a little spider who served God well
Thursday, January 25, 2018
A Russian Series, 3: The Battle of Kursk, 1943 - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
At a railway junction great powers meet
To blacken the earth with a generation
Of young musicians, mechanics, physicians
Electricians, farmers, painters, and poets
And a philosopher who loves to fish
Ground into blood and screams and scraps of flesh
By the future which some have seen, which works 1
For the dress-uniform closed loop of power
Beneath the Russian sky good young men die
And the tyrants who send them lie and deny
1 Lincoln Steffens
mhall46184@aol.com
Kursk
At a railway junction great powers meet
To blacken the earth with a generation
Of young musicians, mechanics, physicians
Electricians, farmers, painters, and poets
And a philosopher who loves to fish
Ground into blood and screams and scraps of flesh
By the future which some have seen, which works 1
For the dress-uniform closed loop of power
Beneath the Russian sky good young men die
And the tyrants who send them lie and deny
1 Lincoln Steffens
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
A Russian Series: 2 - "Until the First Star"
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
The first star won’t be seen this night. The clouds
Obscure this fallen world, and seem to hide
The pilgrim paths to Bethlehem from all
Who seek their Saviour in the colding night
But yet the first star will be seen in truth,
In all the faces around the happy table
Gathered from field and forest, east and west,
Breaking the Advent fast with Christmas joy
And with the liturgies Our Lord is born
Beneath the star that will forever shine
mhall46184@aol.com
“Until the First Star” –
Orthodox Christmas Eve
The first star won’t be seen this night. The clouds
Obscure this fallen world, and seem to hide
The pilgrim paths to Bethlehem from all
Who seek their Saviour in the colding night
But yet the first star will be seen in truth,
In all the faces around the happy table
Gathered from field and forest, east and west,
Breaking the Advent fast with Christmas joy
And with the liturgies Our Lord is born
Beneath the star that will forever shine
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
A Russion Series, 1: All Change at Zima Junction
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
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 are you doing back here
And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
1 Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962
An Apology
I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of vodka bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.
I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.
Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.
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. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?
But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.
mhall46184@aol.com
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 are you 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
1 Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962
An Apology
I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of vodka bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.
I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.
Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.
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. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?
But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.
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