Poetry&Stuffby
MARNE KILATES
MARNE
S
KRIPTS
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
The Russia Suite
A little more than six years after the Marcos dictatorship fell at Edsa due to what has since been called "People Power," six months before parts of the world followed suit and the Berlin Wall tumbled, and within the decade when the Czechs mounted their Velvet Revolution and the dictatorship of the Russian Soviet crumbled, Mike Bigornia and I were witnessing perhaps the last hiccups of empire (now called hegemony) during a 13-day tour of three Russian capitals and obliged friendships (but fine nevertheless) with our guides. We had visited Kiev and Leningrad (now back to St. Petersburg) and our tour was ending. It didn't feel like a writer's tour because we met few writers (the more famous ones were on vacation, it was late summer), and we read poetry on just one occasion. It was a tourist's tour, but sprinkled with a little more culture and museums. From Leningrad we trained back to Moscow on the Overnight Express and saw lots of countryside—what looked to me like Victorian villages amid magnificent stands of pine and birch, or simply endless evergreens in the chill of late summer stretching far into the horizon. Here are my penultimate "diary entries" written a couple of years after.
Moscow: Scenes from Memory
1. EPILOGUE, 1990
Since I saw Moscow, it’s been more
Than half a year. Or half a lifetime
Even, I do not know, for half the world
Had changed--by terror or by temblor,
By the heaving of hearts or continents,
By the machinations of meretricious
Circumstance. Like dominoes, dictators
And dictatorships had fallen one by one,
From the Warsaw Pact to the American
Isthmus, relinquished by the powers
That sustained them—the native
Or the foreign hand. (Ours, long a client
Of one, had vanished at last, after
Lingering in banishment, leaving wounds
In our souls that wouldn’t heal.)
At the Eastern Bloc the Berlin Wall
Was crumbling into souvenirs
(Gorbachev’s face had been carved
Into the pages ofTime), a playwright
Sits at the head of the Czech Parliament,
The Poles have voted their favorite
Union man president. And the people, long
At the throes of their sordid heritage,
Are plunged into the Free World’s
Shoreless seduction: What economics
Or ideologies could save them now?
2. ON THE OVERNIGHT EXPRESS FROM LENINGRAD
Pine, fir, birch, in permanent expanse,
Escorted us across the dawn
Into the rotting outskirts of Moscow.
Leningrad left us sated and mortified
With the opulence of art at the Hermitage,
Loot and heritage of tsars and commissars
From world tours and world wars.
On the overnight express its memory
Had become a residual flatulence
Relieved by the quaintness of samovar
Dispensing the train attendant’s morning tea.
In the golden gray light Moscow awoke
With its frayed elegance of tenements
And factory smoke, as its million intent
Faces preened and slid into streetcars
And the smooth bowels of the Metro.
(Half in jest our guide observed: Here
People seldom smile, in this center
Of State the ambitious of Russia thrive...)
From afar, above the signs of Comecon,
Tungsram, Abloy, Cubafrutas, we glimpsed
Stalin’s spires transfixing the sky
With their sun-gilt five-pointed stars.
1991
The Soviet 'skyscraper', typical of the Stalinist "Empire" style or Socialist Classicism.
Below: Lenin's Tomb (Mausuleum). Maxim Popykin
13. RED SQUARE
That morning in Moscow I will never
Forget: As far as the dappled birches
Bowing in the sun by the Kremlin Wall,
Over asphalt and cobblestone,
Into the great patio under the cupolas
Of St. Basil’s that presided like
Turbaned caliphs over Red Square,
And under the lone spire of Spassky Gate
That kept watch with its stern
Military stare, the lines of devotees
Stretched from the doorstep of Lenin’s
Mausoleum, from the sunlight into
A crypt of red marble. At a signal from
The guards (‘Fix your ties, button up, please,’
Said the public address), a hush fell
Upon the crowd, the soul preened
Before crossing the threshold.
There lay what was left of a man
Who shone one October, heir to the yoke
Of peasant and serf crushed under
The wheels of the Industrial Revolution.
What vision he saw he seems to have
Taken with him under the glass
That shields him now from the world’s
Contagion, as he rests embalmed,
Preserved in the taxidermist’s perfection.
In this shrine of the Other Orthodoxy,
We, pilgrims from other conformities
Pay homage to him who did not conform.
1991
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