It may interest you, Mr. President, to know
that Yevtushenko
is dead.
Yevtushenko, who in the years after Stalin
“took on totalitarian leaders
ideological zealots
and timid bureaucrats.”
He wrote of the heirs of Stalin.
“Stalin was far-sighted," he wrote,
"adept in the art
of political warfare he left
many heirs behind on this globe.”
“The cocks are crowing by the sea
brandishing their wings over the Crimea”
which is how poets alert younger poets
that the future us already on fire
and it’s not something
they bother saying
if it isn’t true--
at the same time, that is how Yevtushenko would say
even though you
are intolerably young
you shouldn’t sit too quietly
your poetry may be bad
but that’s okay: in the arena of
love
and that of conflict
the poet is right
to try everything.
It would be all too easy to make today’s poem
a poem which betrays
certain skillful emergency tactics
though such days, in which we must
play our part, may come
days such as were planted
when Mayakovsky fired that metal
seed into his heart
--today it will suffice
in Yevtushenko’s memory
to politely remind
a globe crawling with goons
itching for a ten-fold Babii Yar,
crawling with hairballs and
pea-heads
with hyperactive speech-patterns,
and jittery protégées
so fond of danger:
"Poetry
is no
chapel of peace.
Poetry
is
savage war.
It has its own manoeuvres of deception.
War
must be
war.
A poet
is a
soldier
and, when he’s right,
he’s right to try all things
when
going through smoke and fire."
Which where there is, there always is.
4/1/2017
