UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG

UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG

       —With thanks to Nâzim Hikmet’s Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

It’s summer, 1989, I’m standing in the back 

of the old wood-panel theater, filled to the rafters with comrades, 

filled with the sultry August heat and sweat, while outside 

the open windows, linden trees conspiratorially whisper 

the secrets of the air to the dank river.

Our oppressive clothing, like the local KGB, sticks to us like glue. 

Minoga ludi, says Oleg, my interpreter. 

Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best 

                   though it is not Sunday. No church bells tolling.

                   I am a visitor, not a tourist, I am bearing witness.

                   An Irish-American poet lost in the land of fields.

In the corner, stands the obligatory red flag of the USSR, 

soaked in the blood poppies of the fallen, 

       with its golden hammer and sickle, that reaped more 

                 than a harvest of wheat.

On the stage, Cossack dancers in red boots

             lash out with their feet, while an old man recites 

                    Taras Shevshenko’s verses 

to the strands of the balalika. A hush falls over the room 

as two maidens join him onstage, 

they are dressed in national costume 

     with wheat fronds in their floral headdresses like a halo

                or a nimbus cloud catching the last light of the sun. 

They carry something old and tasseled, on a pole,

       and as they unroll it, the audience gasps. 

             This is treason, said Oleg, despite Glasnost.

             But there are too many of us to be disappeared 

             during these halcyon days of open-armed Glasnost.

             I repeat, I am bearing witness. I am bearing witness

as I watch

a flag that was hidden, silenced for nearly 75 years, unfurl. 

Blue for the sky and the cornflowers in the fields, 

and yellow for the endless wheat and the sunflowers. 

The lustrous silk quivers and glistens in the limelight,

takes center stage as if it were about to sing an aria. 

              And so it did. Words once uttered, cannot be unsung.

                     There is no taking it back. The road goes ever onward.

I have some questions: who kept that flag safe all those years 

and how was it hidden from the aggressor? In what attic, or dacha?

In what Peredelkino? First, they came for the poets….

A call to poetry is a call to arms. 

                                They are one and the same, said my friend.

The silence in the room was astounding, no one dared breathe. 

And then one old voice began to warble the strains 

of the Ukrainian national anthem. 

         Another voice, also hoary and frail with age, joined him. 

Soon, others joined in, at first, hesitantly, mouthing the words,

       and then they sang with vigor and gusto, as they dusted off 

                  the words unsung for a nearly three-quarters of a century. 

We had witnessed something holy and profound. 

The word was on everyone’s lips 

          though not all knew the anthem. 

                And that day, there was no going back. 

I didn’t know I loved the way that old flag unfurled, 

or the way that paper sheath, stained with age, crackled like fire,

or the way the dustmotes trapped in the floodlights 

took on the twilight of the stars. Sometimes, the road stops here.

And there are things you can no longer retreat from.

It’s February 28, 2022, as Russian tanks wend their way 

towards the heart of the motherland, all roads lead to Kyiv, 

the ludi running ahead of those tanks, removed all the road signs,

they blew up the bridges, sacrificing their lives, 752 civilians dead.

Electronic road signs & billboards, uploaded with words in red lights:

Go fuck yourselves! до росії на хуя. Go back to Russia on your dicks.

You cannot cross the same river even once, said the Dnipro River.

Gospodi. There is no going back. Naked aggression comes 

in the form of Russian airstrikes on civilians. Putin is a whore-

cum-war criminal dressed in his Sunday-best despotic czar fatigues.

                Ukrainian soldiers are bringing their cats to the Russian front.

                Grannies lying on yoga mats, lock & load & aim their AK-47s. 

                Meanwhile, in the Kyiv subway-stations-cum-bomb-shelters, 

                babies are being born, a set of twins, oldtimers play chess,

                mothers & children make Molotov cocktails with laundry soap

                for sticky fire, while a million refugees flee their homeland. 

                               There really is no going back. 

Checkmate. Crimes against humanity. Rust and iron curtains.

                                             The colors of the Ukrainian flag 

are emblazoned on every bridge & every public building 

the world over, as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity, 

dusting off the dulcet words of democracy & freedom for Ukraine.

Babushki offer bread and salt and sweet tea to the defecting soldiers

while Putin sends a bouquet of missiles to the city Kherson, COD.

A Russian soldier wrote to his mother, I am in the Ukraine, 

This is not an exercise, we have bombed all the cities. 

They are throwing themselves beneath our wheels,

they don’t want us here, Mama, this is so hard, 

                                              just moments before he was killed. 

As Lew Welch said, This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

The babushka hands young Russian soldiers handfuls of seeds, saying, 

Put these sunflower seeds in your pockets, please. 

You will lie down here with the seeds. 

               You came to my land. You are occupiers. 

                        Do you understand? You are enemies. 

                             Fucking pieces of shit.

This is the last place, there is nowhere else left to go.

They have already lain down their bodies & souls.

For the seeds of freedom are the only crop 

that will surely grow in black Ukrainian earth.

A vast army of sunflowers tracks the sun.

Slava Ukraini!

           2 March, 2022 From our CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence

• Ukrainian Independence Day
• see also

The New Zamizdat
Russian Connections9/5/19
Survival Strategies for the New Year 1/27/1992
Igor Tishler: A Fantasy Come True 5/1/92
Hermitage Group 5/14/92
Letter to Valentin Yemelin—The Putscht 

Letter to Vika Martsinkevich—The Putscht 
Letter to Valerie Stupachenko—Putscht 
Budapest Nights 
April Foolishness 
On Writing & Dreams 
Dark Winter Days at the Hermitage 

I have many Soviet poems as well: 
LATE AT NIGHT I GET CALLS 
JUNO AND AVOS 
AFTER THE COUP 
VARIATIONS IN WHITE AND BLACK 
ROAD TO UMAN 
COLD WAR 
ON HEARING JOHN HANDY PLAY JAZZ 
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN 
LIVING WITH BEARS 
ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89 
EURASIA IN YOUR EYES 
SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS  
THE LAND OF FIELDS (prose) 

Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost translations 
Poetry Unites the World by Dr. Andrei Bantaş review 
Letter from Oleg Atbashian on translating & Cyrillic typography 
House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad 
Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers
(Night Train to Moscow)