For
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
– March 21, 2001 –
On the occasion of his being made an honorary citizen of Madison, Wisconsin
I
remember when you were as famous as any rock star
or the assassin of one
When
your words were the propaganda weapon
of choice
that both cold war gladiators carried
into battle
Charge!
the USSR said: See how we let him speak the truth.
Counter-charge!
the US replied: See how the truth he speaks says you lie.
What
is freedom of speech
if the word falls in the forest
and nobody hears?
Your words reverberated on the world stage.
When
in the US people who could spin words into something
other than gold (some kind of belief in justice? equality?)
were blacklisted
backlisted into something esoteric
worthless, mockable in a culture where material gain
was the sound of reputations being made
or broken
Elsewhere,
there were (had-been-will-be) gulags, psych wards,
black holes, mass graves
I
remember when defecting Soviet ballet dancers
were like a shot heard round the world
were at least as important as any Super Bowl MVP
Khruschev's
wish to go to Disneyland
made us – the US – winners
while Soviets were fed reel after
black-and-white reel
of desegregation battles in a place
where some are still less equal than others
Ploy
and counter-deployment:
Artists and children on the chessboard
along with soldiers and nuclear warheads
Before
the dominoes clacked louder and louder
in Vietnam
Before the litany of the slain
became our nightly refrain
Kennedy and Oswald, Martin and Malcolm and another Kennedy…
Before the constant barrage of bullets
bombs and burning Buddhist monks
became part of our packaged tv dinners
Your words made the airwaves
And
sang in my ear
as I cradled my guitar
a suburban preteen
second generation
assimilated American
whose Jewish heritage
seemed to erase any ties to
the Russia my grandparents had fled
left
me without the promise
of a country of original descent
that would wrap mythic arms around me
But
your poem Babi Yar
is at the gatepost of a place I come home to
What
shelter I know in this world
is
shadowed by the concentration camps
whose message was with me before I knew it
The
mind's pictures are surely worth a thousand words –
and
more – if we could tell what's etched in early acid
I
never imagined that there were those who didn't know
the word pogrom
or what was baked in the ovens at Auschwitz
I
wanted to learn Russian to read
your original words
for myself
I wanted to go to your American reading at the Library of
Congress when the overflow crowd waited in the streets
(they said in Russia whole stadiums couldn't contain the masses
hungry for the soul food of your words)
Now
many decades later
in a new century
I greet you here
where we may share our Madison citizenship
and the love of words
political
potent poetic passionate
© 2001 Andrea Musher
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