Posts Tagged granite
ALIASES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010

The Lenin Statue, the new FSB (aka Cheka, NKVD, KGB) HQ and a new church supported, in part, by Mars pet foods. ©SCES 2000
We remembered the newsreels with Uncle Joe
aka Koba the only one in grey,
so expected a black and white city.
But the colours astound us, beguile.
From our apartment – which used to be bugged -
we overlook what used to be October Square.
The monumental bronze statue -Â of Lenin, V.I.,
with assorted comrade soldiers and sailors set to march,
by Gorky Park, over the Crimea Bridge,
toward the Kremlin – is intact.
In May, parties of veterans queue to see Lenin
(erstwhile Ulyanov, V.I.) preserved.
Behind the Mausoleum, in the garden
of remembrance, is a bust of Stalin
(erstwhile Djugashvili, J.V.). Always,
fresh roses surround it. However,
in the Sculpture Park, the Great Helmsman,
in red granite, has had his nose knocked off.
Putin (sic), V.V. is crowned in the Tzar’s Cathedral,
the Annunciation. The double-headed eagle flies.
Like his forebears, he takes the salute in Red Square.
They are all dressed up in the uniforms
of the Great Patriotic War – and the troops
(not a tenor amongst them) greet their little C in C
with the time dishonoured and oh
so genuinely moving: “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
Sometimes, that spring, when we opened the windows,
we thought we smelled tundra, sea and ice.
Opposite the Lenin statue, outside the Metro,
an elderly woman, in a worn, quilted coat,
sold wild hyacinths. We did not understand
the price. She fluttered her hand above her heart.
EPIPHANIES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 30th, 2009
Citizens falter in the purposeful street.
Above the fumes of money, confusion,
from the leaden gaps of sky comes a murmuring,
a sigh like breathing, pulsing of blood.
Swans are flying on unhurried wing beats,
necks as prows towards horizons. Glinting
like new coins, pedestrians’ faces
turn skyward… The city smells of warm stone.
Sun illuminates the prison’s granite.
Thrust through the bars of a cell window
are a pair of hands, palms upward. Whatever
they have done, those fingers, spread like wings, chill
the indifferent light…
LA PIÈTA
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 21st, 2009
of the known world – of hewn porphyry,
of granite kept in its place, of usury.
Â
Irony turns each illuminated page,
celebrates the dissemination
of the word, funds the seeding of Europe
beyond oceans, in jungle, across pampas,
over sierra. Only the clash of
vultures and the seas’ predictable tides
can erase carrion from argent sands.
Â
How light the Saviour is! The Virgin seems
to hold him with such ambivalent ease:
a supplicant offering a sacrifice,
a rescuer carrying a corpse.
Â


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