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

At the Babi Yar: eating the dead

 

I have stood at the palisade of the Bibi Yar. The Babi Yar was "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust." I mis-heard it as Bibi Yar, as there wasn't much available information about it in 1989. 

So much of what I learned was in the oral tradition from the Ukrainians themselves. During the height of Glasnost, they began to speak of the dark secrets of the land. I wonder if it's Ukrainian vs Russian sp.? Baba as in babushka. Babii, plural. The grandmothers' ravine. Yar, A Turkish word. A multi-cultural name. 

 It wasn't just  a mass grave of Jews. Armenians. Tsigani/gypsies. Ukrainian dissenters, students, poets, musicians. Any Nazi dissenter, and later, Stalinist dissenters as well. 

My friends spoke of the massive bonfire funeral pyres that reached to the Ukrainian sky because there were too many bones to hide. Stalin was sweeping it under the rug, so to speak. That summer, Ukraine's golden wheat fields were a carpet of shame. Bone ash fertilized the crops—the Ukrainians were eating their dead for decades to come. 

But the dead were speaking through the mouths of the living—a vast hunger for truth. And so they began to raise the Ukrainian flags for the first time in nearly a century. A vast blue sky over golden fields nourished with bones.

I remember standing at the rim and weeping. It was so visceral. So real. The wind in the trees whispering. Yet there were only a handful of us, there was no memorial. No visual markers to tell us how to feel, like at other holocaust memorials. Just the deep sorrow of the ravine. 

Journal entry, 6/29/91, dropping off Oleg Atbashian

6/29/93 12:38 AM, what better time than to start a new journal, having just dropped Oleg Atbashian off at the San Francisco Greyhound station, the end of relationship, end of a project—and a new beginning with my art. I am really ready to be done with him.

Sad to report it since Oleg’s been here, I’ve only filled one journal. Nine months of relationship absorbing all my free time. So much conflict with us, the useless arguing, we even managed to contradict each other on our final ride to San Francisco. He’s on his way to LA, then to Fort Worth, New York, and then home to the USSR. He was definitely saying goodbye forever, and I guess whatever we had, the experiment that failed, it’s gone forever, though we told each other I love you, what is there really?

He goes back to his kids and wife in the Ukraine. What of her? Someone said Nadia went to the authorities to report him missing, having abandoned his family. I can’t help but wonder what horrors he will face when he gets home.

All his American loot will bring much excitement. Two heavy suitcases, a backpack, and a Macintosh. Between the two of us, we could barely carry it all. How will he managed if no one meets him in Fort Worth, or New York? I can’t imagine him in the Moscow Airport trying to get to Kiev train station. But that is no longer my worry.

When I think of my lover leaving, it makes me cry. When I think of all the technical difficulties, I remain dry-eyed. I can’t imagine why he so easily riles me up. Yesterday, after making love, we finally talked a little bit about ourselves, and the relationship. The scary part is how alike we are. So, even though he was from a completely different culture and language, we managed to find a twin of ourselves. Dysfunctional match. He said I was like his grandfather and I said he is like my grandmother.

The constant contradictions in arguments over trifles—we both became our own worst enemies, and exorcised our personas on each other with predictable results. We’re both equally guilty of something we had little control over. I often felt possessed by a demonic urge to challenge, to be hard, and he really brought out a side of me from my childhood that I don’t like at all. He says we’re too alike to have a relationship. We are two pluses, we each need a negative to balance us out. He thinks similarity is a bad thing. I think it’s positive.

Stalemate. Checkmate. Guilt is a motivating factor, feelings of inadequacy. He says I’m more of a male-female while he is a feminine male. The problem is, it’s easy for him to not develop and grow, he lets me take the role of responsibility and he becomes a parasite, like the male parasite fish attached permanently to the side of the colossal female, so huge, that scientist at first assumed they were two different species.

He said he learned a lot from me, not necessarily positive. He said he learned that he needs to be kinder. I probably tenderized him enough to make his relationship with his wife better, such bitter  irony there. Where does love fit into all of this conflict? He says to remember the bad times when you wanted me out of the house, it’ll make it easier.

So easy for us to cry, and to hold each other. In bed we were friends, better lovers than workmates. A reversal of our role in Cherkassy. Emotionally, it was a roller coaster, though I seemed to retain a clarity as to why I reacted, and felt the way I did, but I was helpless to prevent the emotional upheaval.

What do tears mean, and those three words, I love you? Values. Sex wasn’t enough to make the relationship work—really work. We both wanted something more tranquil and supportive. Instead we got chaos, and fireworks. I felt angry because I was having to do so much work to keep us physically afloat. Maybe having him in my territory was the real problem. We talked about the conflict there too—we both want to occupy the same territory and I’m not used to sharing that space, and neither is  he. He thinks he began to recognize some of my criticisms were based upon truth after all.

It’s going to seem strange sleeping alone, our silly mammalian talk, horses and rummaging rights, penguin talk and blue sky acts. Once he rubbed my ass saying blue sky! And the sky turned blue. It stuck and every time he wanted blue skies to appear, he’d rub my ass. Silly things that lovers too. I’ll miss the affection and the sex it was satisfying—for the most part.

His odd quirk, his dislike of my breathing on him never changed, it continue to hurt my feelings when he turned his head away. He had enough phobias, it sometimes made life difficult. He was so intolerant of my animal love noises, my licking and biting and scratching. I was surprised when he asked me to scratch him very gently the other day. It took us a long time to trust each other sexually.

His changeability, apparently a cancer trait, was very unhealthy for me, creating a whole scenario of mistrust. We never quite molded each other into the likeness that we each desired. We never quite accepted each other the way we are, flaws and all.

Luis says there’s a danger in trying to remake someone, codependency. I was definitely trying to remake Oleg over. The entire fucked Soviet system of co-dependency equaling love. And to his credit, he did improve in many areas. I told him how difficult it was for me to have someone entirely dependent upon me. How it drained me. He really was foolishly wise. Childlike in so many ways. We really were from different eras, time travelers. But the hourglass shattered.