We live, not feeling the earth beneath us
At ten paces our words evaporate.
But when there’s the will to crack open our mouths
our words orbit the Kremlin mountain man.
Murderer, peasant killer.
His fingers plump as grubs.
His words drop like lead weights.
His laughing cockroach whiskers.
The gleam of his boot rims.
Around him a circle of chicken-skinned bosses
sycophantic half-beings for him to toy with.
One whines, another purrs, a third snivels
as he babbles and points.
He forges decrees to be flung
like horseshoes
at the groin, the face, the eyes.
He rolls the liquidations on his tongue like berries
delicacies for the barrel-chested Georgian.
"Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
-Osip Mandelstam
Sources on Osip Mandelstam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osip_Mandelstam
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mandelst.htm
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=38
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/698
http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/n_mandelstam.html
Sources On Stalin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/king-commissar.html
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9498
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm
Sources on Acmeist Poetry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acmeism
http://www.jazzkeyboard.com/jill/akhmatova/index.html
http://www.usc.edu/dept/las/sll/eng/ess/obv99.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgiy_Ivanov
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