Russian Tales

Zhivago’s film runs and I step into it, blinking
against Baltic light, clear as a boy soprano’s rising notes
but casting long, low shadows.
Russian dolls: a mystery within a mystery,
everything contrariwise as wonderland
and I am Alice.
Cold burns the face, ice-drops my eyelashes,
frost sparkles the turrets of this Magic Kingdom.
Snow falls: filmic dry flakes and polystyrene balls
and I in my every-day shoes.

The Russian heart frosted with hardship;
small women wrapped in elegant fur coats
which swish and prowl, or stalk like bears
or hang on mannequins, trapped in a glazed arcade
while I hear wraith-cries blowing from the gulags.

Within these alien churches, turban-topped,
gold onion domes, criss-crossed with piety,
rise mosaic scenes from childhood Sunday-school
of Jesus by the lake, familiar as bread and butter.
Heavy silver icons, the pauper Christ child
peeps through ostentatious gilding;
so love can suffocate the thing it loves.

Scarlet carnations scattered on snow graves
blood stains crystallised like sugared fruit,
Snow-white, Rose-red. Here fairytales take flesh;
the wax-work Lenin in his gloomy mausoleum,
like Sleeping Beauty in glass coffin.

My train rolls slowly through these northern forests,
snow quilts the steep rooved houses,
which come and go through carriage windows;
snow-drooped branches, silver knees in drifts,
sparkle in the spell of the Snow Queen.
We are sheltered in our plush compartment
as princesses in their boxes at the ballet
whose time has passed, that whistle blown,
and I remember cattle trucks of human dreams
which rattled this way, into endless night.

Eternal flame leaps skywards in a deserted snow-bound park.



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