Waiting for Someone to Come Along (for Kiev)

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from “Высока луна Господня”  by Fyodor Sologub

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
They have all gone
to the underground shelters,
so it is hard for me.
Nothing to do, my food quite gone,
I am exhausted today.

The old houses in this narrow lane
curve in upon themselves and stare
each into the other’s windows.
We all peer out. Not one
of the others dares to bark.
The heat is off, the lights
have been extinguished.
Alone and bored and freezing,
we take our cues from the moon
that watches and says nothing.

The street, swept clean
of children, bottles, litter,
is empty and dead.
Nothing rattles about
to make it worth our while
to set up a collective howl.

Where have they all gone?
Why did they look at the sky
like frightened rabbits
when hawks are around?
There are no footsteps, nothing
crunches into the newly
fallen snow. I sniff the street
with alarm: nothing at all,
not even a scent
from the edge of a boot-print.

Waking or sleeping, how can we do
our jobs if no one is there? The quick step
of the hurried-home, the sly tread
of the house-thief, the happy stride
of the returning traveler: the signs
for which we live and what we warn of —
just who are we waiting for
when no one is here to tell?

Hours ago an unmarked truck
went by, and then a tank,
and then the sky lit up.
Who could we tell? What was
the point of putting up a ruckus?
Were those who drove by
without regarding us friends,
or enemies? Who knows?

I have found my way out

through an open coal chute.
I am the only one, it seems

who can come and go at will.

Out here in the cold I am alone.
The eaves are little shelter
when the wind grows cold.
This cannot go on. I must do
something! Something!
I shall sit beneath this window
and howl my lungs out.

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
Sadness torments me.
Soon I shall be too weak
to continue this alarm
about nothing and for no one
in particular. What is wrong with me?

Please break the silence!
Sisters, sisters, come to your windows.
Part the curtains with curious snouts.
No one is coming! We have been
left behind! Look! The sky explodes
with yellow and red flashes!
Bark, sisters, bark at the moon!

Man of the Hour

 by Brett Rutherford

Those mouse-like men
     who ousted Gorbachev
while he was up in the air,
and far from the border;
oh, how brave they were,
belling the cat’s absence;
and then they fled
to their Moscow apartments,
under the blankets in a vodka stupor.

All knew the routine.
Glasnost had played itself
as the long arachnid trap,
predictable as tide or snow,
or a lesson in dialectics.

A liberal Spring, a little thaw
to bring the poets and liberals out.
Then watch them, count them.
Make lists. Prepare the officers
for the sudden clampdown,
boxcars to the always-open Gulag.
All hail to Party chairman,
whoever that turned out to be.

But this time, it did not go
as the planners intended.
It only took one man, one
near the apex of power, to prove
that cycles are not eternal, hope
no poison beet on a string,
a false promise in a pot of borscht,

one man to say, “Not this time.”
Make no mistake: Boris Yeltsin
ended the Communist rule of Russia.
A great bear, a man without fear.
He did not need to be sober to win,
just a little more sober than
his cowering enemies.

No one knew how
it would all turn out.
That it came out differently
is what we need to learn.