Volume 33, Summer 2022
The Peace Enigma of Stillness
Herds of trees stumble out in the distance
Wailing in a low undertone
Some falling towards the sky
Burning with the speed of an invasion
How hard they try to become birds
A flock of trees nearing a death experience
Flying through their immortality horizon
Nothing left behind but timelessness
The sky undresses for the sunrise
As laughter disappears beneath frozen waterfalls
This is the startling winter landscape of WWIII
Shark’s smiles tattooed onto toys of war
Thousands of blacksmiths forging new death-tools
Others assembling coffins with no names
For the unmarked crosses of young
Dressed in white, little green men
Sad prisoners of vodka and greed
Like termites swarming European plains
Fashioned into coal dust body bags
Screams of scars and excrement cover the snow
Oh mother of death, they do not have to perish
Lips of the icy corpse will never drink the wine
This blood drenched was once a forest
In the depth of winter there is an invincible summer
Welcome to the Putin Archipelago
On the bridge to Red Square lay the body of Nemtsov
Shot four times in the back, beside the Kremlin Wall
Here slept Lenin, here slept Stalin
Where is the hope to end war and corruption?
Oh! Russia of my childhood, Mayakovski’s Moscow
Watch the convoy of what trucks as a diversion
Tanks and missiles rumbling toward the Ukranian front
Cossacks against Maidan-fascists, brother against brother
Watch Putin the Great sieze more territories
Crimea, part of the soul of every Russian
Crimea, the fist of aggression against the West
Donetsk connected to mother Russia, the New-Russia
The Putin Archipelago grows, South Ossetia, part of Georgia
Abkhazia & Chechnya and rest of the Gulag
Annexation Syndrome: grab east of Ukraine
While the West groggily sleepwalking
6000 civilians dead, discouraged, missing
Unpronounceable names of destroyed villages
Legislation changed, opposition killed, reformers jailed
The Russians are marching past St. Basil Cathedral
Past the Kremlin’s chiming watchtowers
No hope in sight, no freedom of thought for decades
Reverse epiphany of planetary love and hate
Pussy Riot in exile, Kasparov in exile, Navalny in prison
As so many before, Boris Nemtsov, another martyr silenced