.
The Fire of History
My grandmother clasped the feathers
that were loosened from her pillow
until they fused into a damp tuft;
her words find me as the radio blares.
A clock cannot help the sound of its ticking
and the robins, their diurnal chirping.
‘What good was
.............this life
that even in its final, weak
........flicker
...........wounds me?’
.......‘Where is your father?
..............................together we can remember
the garden of the wooden, plain-faced town
............we fled from, where I passed my girlhood.
................How those blossoms, knots of
..orange and green bulbs, emanated
a dim, confused radiance!
I want to remember that garden
before it was
consumed
by the fire
..........that
...............fell
....................from German airplanes.’
‘He’s not here, Babushka.’
‘O.’
‘my girl, I love you.'
................‘I know.'
'O.'
'Then there was that woman with your name, Elvira, the daughter of a Kazahki neighbor
with three babes as thin as boards who gave herself to soldiers in exchange for bread and
..................dark sugar she measured out in quarters of a gram.
.................................She died
..................in a field of cauliflower-colored airplane parts
..................clutching
her infant son,
.................................and even now I can feel her
.....................................dying
...............beneath the endless sky, and that foliage,
beneath that foliage that lazily
......hung
........where the oak tree bloomed igneous metal.
............She was a
..................good woman but life doesn’t deliberate virtue
..............and it
......too is hard
for good women like us.’
Virginal and cold, as if blown in from the Volga,
an augury of fire ignites all the channels
on the radio dial. ‘Are they really preparing
for another war?’ she asks. The robins
suddenly fly off the lindens crowding the windows,
as if to avoid her visage as I begin to answer.
Bio:
I am a philosophy student finishing her BA in June at CUNY Hunter College and will enter a doctoral philosophy program in the fall at the CUNY Graduate Center. I principally research German Idealism, Marx and the Frankfurt School. I have worked as an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies and the Journal of Social Philosophy. Although I pursue philosophy professionally, I have been writing poetry since I was fourteen, drawing considerably from history and my family members’ experiences in the former Soviet Union and as immigrants in the United States. I have never published.
(author retains copyright)
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