I'm back in the USSR
listening to the Beatles sing,
Money Can't Buy Me Love.
White geese surround the red car in the rain.
Wild chickory blooms by the roadside
gravemarkers, marigolds, a child dead.
Casual flocks of pigeons, grace notes on the wires.
An old woman who sells apples from a bucket
waiting for two Sundays to come together,
contemplates the ground outside her yard.
Why are the chickens here in such a hurry?
Driving anywhere in the Ukraine
it's always the same landscape.
Agrarian and modern worlds collide.
At every battle site, Soviet tanks,
grim reminders of the war; any war.
Perhaps it's best this way
precisely because it continues to remind us
everything is a matter of degree.
We talk about what is possible in life
and of the Cold War, asking each other
what was it all about anyway?
Stalin has been dead a long time.
Written on the soles of my shoes:
Make peace not war, make love not war.
Every step I take is a prayer wheel.
Storks continue to build nests on thatched roofs.
8/10/89
1990 Molod Cherkaskiny, translated by Oleg Atbashian
Haight Ashbury Literary Quarterly
The Gift of Dreams
2003 Poets Against The War, PoetsAgainstTheWar.org, 3 Best Poems of the Day recognition, e-zine
CORRUPTED
DOROGA NA UMANH
≈ snova v SSSR
i slyflu, kak Bitlz po®t
money can't buy me love...
Belye gusi tolpÂts u krasnoj mafliny
pod serym do_d¯m...
€¯ltye grozdh Üvetov u obocin,
golubi seli melodiej na provodax...
Staruxa s korzinkoj torguet zel¯nymi Âblokami,
sidit odinoko i budto by _d¯t,
kogda, nakoneÜ, u_e vmeste sojduts dva voskresenhÂ,
slepo ustavÂsh na zeml®, kotora ó ne e¯ i nichÂ...
No ÜyplÂta ó naprotivó vs¯ vrem kuda-to speflat!
Po vsej Ukraine
vstreca mirov ó
sovremennosth i pastoralh.
Tam, gde byli boi óstarye tanki
neumolimo napomina®t nam o vojne: o vsÂkoj vojne.
No starye tanki lucfle novyx raket.
My sporim o _izni i o xolodnoj vojne.
Bo_e, otkuda vs¯ ¥to na nas svalilosh? Zacem?
Vedh Stalin umer v denh moego ro_denhÂ!
I na moix podoflvax ó pecati:
zajmitesh-ka lucfle l®bovh®, a ne vojnoj!
I ka_dyj moj flag ó slovno pripev k molitve.
I aisty stroÂt gn¯zda na solomennyx kryflax...
NEED HARD COPY
I'd say the Russian translation is unsalvageable...it was during the days when there was no standard Cyrillic keyboard for Apple and Oleg Atbashian was using a homemade version of Smolensk typeface.
Letter from Oleg Atbashian "I created a new font Oleg Leningrad, which is the same Leningrad 24, but with the key map same as Smolensk. So, all the files we had in Smolensk, can be easily converted to Oleg Leningrad with the only problem that S-k is 12, and L-d is only 24."
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