Lawrence Hall HSG
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                            You are Going to Write a Poem Today

                             A poet's words can outlive empires
                             and shake the foundations of tyrants.

                                              -Yevtushenko

You are going to write a poem today
Although you will never finish it
For the hours, or a person from Porlock
Will lead you to pause your thought for a time

Your poem will repose as a meditation
A word upon the altar of your mind
And even as you are distracted at Mass
Your poem becomes a tiny sip of salvation

All the truthing words that have come to you -
There on your mindful altar they bless the world

Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]

                           The Wind Drove the Pages Wild

                     Reading Yevtushenko on a Windy Day

The flapping, fluttering pages went wild in the wind
And poetry sometimes should go wild, blow wild
To shake those gently slumbering words awake
Provoking peaceful musings into a storm

Nouns chasing verbs into logical conclusions
That turn about and bite the reader in the (hand)
And adjectives torment the symbolism
While adverbs, as always, were mostly in the way

I just wanted a quiet hour with coffee and verse
But flapping, fluttering pages went wild in the wind

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     ­      My Bourgeois Leanings

          One day, at a meeting of the Komsomol…he was accused
          of bourgeois leanings just because he happened to wear a tie.

                          -Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography,
                                    recounting an anecdote by his father

I am the only man who wears a tie
With proper coat and trousers (inspection pass)
Properly kitted like a proper guy
To weddings, funerals, dinners, and Sunday Mass

I am the only man who does not wear
Sneakers or baseball caps, gas-station shades
Knee pants, tee shirts, jeans with a built-in tear
Or plastic jackets shaped like hand grenades

If we are facing civilization’s end -
One’s trousers touch one’s oxfords with a quarter-inch bend

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                              Lines for Marina Tsvetaeva

        “Her poetry is…passion, pain, metaphor, and music.”

                                 - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Her words soar over utilitarians
Past pale, pedantic propagandists who
Would wrench all poetry into a cause
As if verse were but a commodity

Her picture on a Penguin paperback
Embraces the viewer, stares back, dares back
Her eyes defiant, her arms folded in hope
Armored in her famous clunky jewelry

She bleeds onto the page, into the soul
Her words, suspended in truth against the age

But Yevtushenko...

                      A tribute to Penguin paperbacks

When they
Someday
Take us away
For reading
For thinking
For writing

Those Penguin paperbacks all tattered and taped
Discovered when they empty our pockets
          Will
Be used against us in their courts of law

But Yevtushenko might corrupt our jailers

“The F_g with the Bow Tie” 1

            “Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed.
              Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a  
              motive  for ******?”

                                                -Osip Mandelstam 2

Spain. Poetry got people killed in Spain -
And still wherever tyrants of delicate nerves
And artistic sensitivities hear
Whispered rumors of whispered disapproval

And so an innocent, fearful and trembling
Must be motored away to a moonless death
Upon orders spoken, written, tweeted
Telephoned, telegraphed, or teletyped

One prays he has a moment to adjust his tie
Perfectly - as an honor to Poetry




1 The slur is attributed to Federico Garcia Lorca’s murderers:
https://lithub.com/dictators-****-poets-on-federico-garcia-lorcas-last-days/

2 Quoted by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 20th Century Russian Poetry

All Change at Zima Junction

For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017

Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer

And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what are you doing back here

And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction

“I went, and I am still going.”1


1Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962