We dreamed of revolution.
What came to Russia was terror,
terror that left us voiceless,
faceless, betrayed.
Blood in the streets.
Blood splattered on boots.
Blood that stank like blood.
I stood seventeen months
in prison lines three hundred women long,
waited to plead with the hangman
for my son. Seventeen months
I listened to the scrape
of the iron key that never
opened the lock.
Leave, said my friends
as they fled our land,
Leave Russia forever, they said.
But I could no more leave
the birches and pines,
the high mountains and endless steppes,
no, I could no more leave
the Russian people
than I could leave my own skin.
The government called me
an anachronism. They snarled,
“half nun, half whore.” They claimed
I contributed nothing to communism.
Burned my books. Forbid me
to publish more.
They killed my ex-husband.
My next husband, too.
They claimed intelligence
was a sin.
But when we’re silenced,
that’s the summons for our voice to grow,
and I went from the voice
of one woman wanting
to the voice of over
a hundred million mouths screaming,
screaming for freedom, for justice, for life.
They thought that by corseting my words
they could contain them. But they thought wrong.
Now, I whisper poems into the ears of my friends
and my words travel on, become living poems,
poems that throng in the streets.
Poems that stand in line and speak
to the women with blue lips who wail.
Poems that turn into ribbons
that flutter beyond the butcher’s reach.
Poems that slip beneath locked doors
that speak of suffering, futile war.
Now I know what art is for.
