Khersonsky

Khersonsky

Lights hang from trees in the crystal moonlight.

Where musicians used to trick with kletzmer.

Poets stab urgent sentences left unfinished.

Mute philosophers squint bitter insights.

Statues play politics in City Garden.

The grass in the park is lush as lettuce.

Sycamores crack barks on Richelieu Street.

Pushkin liked the European ambience;

Till he full-fathomed the governor’s wife,

And had to button up in a hurry.

Brodsky’s angry dust crackles nastily;

He railed against Shevchenko’s ‘gibberish’.

Flame marks on buildings testify to hate.

Odessa smells like a burnt bowl of borscht.

To hold to your signature idiom;

To join the table of prophetic poets,

For whom moral freedom is oxygen;

To keep calm when the clock ticks into night;

To shed terror in the dark before dawn;

To sound the common rhymes of existence;

To stare the intimations and not flinch:

These tests are easy when you know for sure

Putin’s squad won’t plant a bomb at your door;

(Poets are free then to grab the lion of angst.)

They struck at a poet’s flat in Odessa -

Hiding the bomb under refuse sacks,

Hurting the woman who was once his wife.
But Khersonsky keeps faith with Odessa.