Poems of witness. Too bad they must continue to be written. These were written by a 27 year old woman in the dying Soviet Union’s gulags. Carved into soap with a matchstick, then washed away after being memorized.
And then they’ll torch the cattle, houses with napalm,
measure the children with wheels of a tank,
level walls to the ground.
But maybe they won’t touch the crazed old women—
and don’t keep bringing up the schoolbook: the condemned
know the histories—
time’s worn thin above the place of execution, begins to leak.
God grant you don’t learn what the wife of salt will see:
a PPSh machine gun or a short Roman sword?
—23 July 1984
Irina Ratushinskaya
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