суббота, 27 февраля 2010 г.

Poetry: What's Your Pleasure?

WHAT’S YOUR PLEASURE?

“We are used to being killed in scores of millions!”

Alexander V Demidov, “God Votes for Perestroika”

“And you sir? What’s your pleasure?”

A simple choice to make at leisure—

Whisky, gin, champagne?—

They offered in the airborne plane.

I’d crossed a borderline

In Yerevan to board a liner

(A cleaner world this side but otherwise no different—

They choices that one faced made all the difference).

Sipping listlessly my wine,

I brooded on the choices left behind.

A doctor had to amputate an arm

Of a baby girl and keep his calm

Full aware that but for lack of medicament

There would never have been such a predicament.

An altogether gruesome task;

Of a Westerner it would have been too much to ask.

But Soviets are incredibly tough:

They’ve been facing deadlier choices long enough.

Trapped in darkness under debris,

Longing for another daybreak

And fighting for each breath

Is not an easy way to meet your death.

But was it more pleasant

For those Ukrainian peasants

Who, robbed of their bread,

Were slowly starved to death because

They didn’t feel like setting up kolkhoz?

(How many dead? Twenty million—or so they said.)

And to be shot in the back of your head

When along a prison corridor you are being led

May seem a quicker way—with lead—to break the thread

But surely not if such an end

For years on end

You’ve been made to dread.

(How many dead? Twenty million—or so they said.)

Or, perhaps, you would prefer it more

To join the corps in many a symbolic war

Sped away to useless battles

Bled to death like butchered cattle?

(How many dead? Twenty million—or so they said.)

Again and again:

What’s your pleasure?—

It’s socialism that we treasure!

Well then… You haven’t yet paid the full measure:

You’ve already had seventy years delivered to you—

Three score is paid, ten more is due.

Alexander V Demidov

20 December 1988

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