March 2024
Author's Note: These poems are from my manuscript-in-progress, Russian Honeymoon, a memoir in verse about the 15 months I spent as a new bride, touring the USSR on an exhibit through the United States Information Agency in 1975 and 1976. Few of the poems stand alone, but I hope this biographical note will provide a context. So much has changed since then, and so much has stayed the same!
Pilgrims in Red Square
In summer our hotel is the Metropol
near Red Square. The Kremlin bells
toll the hour in a cascading knell,
announcing the power of time.
We stroll across the brick plaza,
eye the line of worshipers waiting
to see waxy Lenin in his coffin. The line
coils around the square in the damp hot
afternoon. Women wear dowdy dresses
in faded floral prints. Men wear hats
made by hand from the pages of Pravda;
cardboard triangles hang from the bridges
of their glasses to shield their noses
from the stinging sun. Someday, these
will be their good old days, the colorful
bright domes of St. Basil’s cathedral
resplendent in the stinging sun.
Ukraine
Zaporozhe is warm in early fall.
We gather with locals along the banks
of the dirty Dnieper; some even bathe here.
Others in our group run miles
in the smoggy air. The city’s charms
remain concealed; trees along the boulevards
go sallow-brown. One day off,
they take us on a drive to the Sea of Azov;
here we walk along a marshy shore
in bleak daylight. There is no knowing
that in a few decades this will be a stage
for war. Another day, our field trip
is to a brewery, where foul river water
is fashioned into beer. My only photos
from here are of a November 7th parade:
tanks, soldiers, missiles, red-kerchiefed
teenaged Young Pioneers in cheap shoes
marching with rifles. 20 years later
I show these photos to my students,
Jews who fled poverty and lifetimes
of oppression, they cluck fondly, memory-
stirred. Here they were miserable, but alive.
Even the bleakest places grow a sheen
when memory reminds: Yes, here we knew
such misery. But oh, how alive we were!
Decades later, Zaporozhe is in the news,
its name gets a new spelling and the city
feels anew the weight of sorrow.
Odessa
See if you can find our relatives, Mother writes.
I've seen the famous steps, the harbor, the opera house,
the memorial to Pushkin. I've avoided the stone Lenin
that wasn’t there when my grandfather fled,
and the monuments that followed to the dead.
I don’t know what good my people left behind,
only know there were men on horseback, fires, terror.
I don’t try to find any who bear our family name.
This is no more the place they left, nor the one
that meets me in 1975. I imagine my forebears
boarding a ship in that harbor long ago: my teenaged
granddad, gazing at the diminishing city, vowing
to leave it all behind except a shell of his culture
and all of his name, watching his history tumble
in the vessel’s vanishing wake.
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