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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