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Putin

POETRY

AT LENIN’S TOMB

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

We joined the queue one warm afternoon two days

before Victory Day, and the week Putin

was first crowned. There were police everywhere –

mostly, it seemed, armed thirteen year olds

in wide-brimmed caps. One halted the queue

to allow a group of be-medalled,

self-conscious veterans to enter first.

Inside, we were ‘forbidden to smoke, talk, photograph,

video, or have your hands in your pockets’.

 

Exiled to the conifer forests

of Central Siberia with its gnat

legions of summer, its winter numbing,

he took his pseudonym then soubriquet

from the river Lena, its waters

replete with minerals and mammoth tusks.

 

Curious the great revolutionary

with that questioning, directing look  –

who found sleep elusive so studied French

grammar books to send him to the Land of Nod –

through no choice of his own, preserved like a

waxwork or a shaman!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ADRIFT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

Where part of the back wall of the scena

of the Greco-Roman amphitheatre

has collapsed, we can see the sun setting

on Etna, its smoke drifting like a veil

over the sea. The town’s orchestra –

of mandolins, lutes, guitars, double bass –

with its plangent, sentimental, heart-

rending timbre plays the prelude to act one

of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’…

 

We saw the opera at the Bolshoi –

with its gilt chairs and the Romanov box

with the hammer and the sickle above –

the month Vladimir Putin was first crowned.

When we left the theatre in the soft dusk

of May there was a babushka begging.

In the Lubyanka metro station,

a drunken man rolled down the escalator…

 

As Venus appears in the south east,

the orchestra plays encores – ‘Volare’,

‘Torna a Surriento’, ‘Ritorna-me’.

The audience, mostly local, largely

female, sways and hums, secure, for that moment,

in its campanilismo, thinking of amore…

 

Small boats are approaching, in the thickening

dark, from North Africa and the Levant,

chartered by men – vessels overladen with

women and children, craft whose landfall, whose

free fall will set tolling each and every

bell in the frantic campanile.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ALIASES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read3.2K views

The Lenin Statue, the new FSB (aka Cheka, NKVD, KGB) HQ and a new church supported, in part, by Mars pet foods. ©SCES 2000
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 –  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.

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