By Thomas Davis
Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.
Charles McPhedran, Mother Jones Magazine
I keep imagining Yevtushenko on a Moscow stage in 1961,
young, eyes bright, arms flailing, his pacing energy
exploding into a wild, deep voice
as he declaims about Babi Yar and Stalin’s evil
as Jewish bodies decayed in an unmarked ravine in Ukraine.
I keep seeing the Russian crowd,
glittering sophistication,
stunned at first and then roaring
as poetry stirs in the Russian soul
and reminds them that Stalin, the Tsars,
the years when peasants struggled for survival,
the siege of the Nazis at Stalingrad
were the past, never to be repeated.
Inside that image, I keep sensing
the old Russian bear stirring,
shapeshifting, growling old resentments
into bombs that explode into apartment buildings
and schools and maternity wards
where new-born babies and their mothers
lie screaming as walls shudder and fall.
And I keep wondering if it is Russians
rising out of their history into rage—
or if the Russians are humankind
attacking, attacking, attacking
all life on earth out of history and insatiable greed.
“Blood is flowing,
spreading across the floors,” Yevtushenko wrote.
“And I, myself,
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.”
fourwindowspress 