While I Wrote This a Battering Ram of Knives Excavated Old Wounds -- The Poem Attacking Stalin

(Osip)

Aaron, Rafi (1959)

Original Text

Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam, ed. Allan Briesmaster (Hamilton, Ontario: Seraphim Editions, 2006): 23-24.

1There is something deep inside me, I don’t know who

2placed it there. Perhaps it entered me the way the north

3wind enters a woman’s dress knocking loudly on her

4knees, making her head turn and her face flush before

5freezing the flesh of her thighs. Sometimes I think it

6sank into me when my birth water was washed away. It

7doesn’t matter how it arrived. It’s here and insists on

8going for long walks to take the night air.

9Once and only once the days were little finger bells that

10sounded so nicely. Then the dancing stopped, the band

11shell collapsed, and now there is only the air playing

12single notes on a rasping lung. This does not matter to

13you, BUT (finally that word appears like a mountain

14cutting off the view of the valley I loved to look at) the

15hour hand has hypnotized your days and meaningless

16motions fill your life. And this thing inside me wants to

17waken you. It is as if the forests were on fire and the

18squirrels and earthworms adjourned their meetings and

19the wild flowers with no next of kin perished. Now

20people pretend that the pinks and the purples that

21coloured the hills never existed, maybe they saw

22something else. A white sheet at midnight can be

23mistaken for a ghost or so I have been told.

24Pay attention to what I am about to say. What is deep

25inside me moves away from the darkness, the lily pads,

26the tiny fish and the coral reef where it breathes and

27bathes, multiplies and manipulates the light into red

28and yellow streamers. And just as it is blindfolded and

29the final commands are given, it speaks because it

30cannot be silenced the way a volcano sitting still for

31years suddenly shakes and pulls open its lower lip

32spilling knowledge over the world. (After this there

33are always tears, destroyed thoughts, uninhabitable

34ideologies and the smell of smoke reminds us that

35Truth is forever burning.)

36And what bubbles from within me fills broken boxcars,

37becomes fruit in a petrified forest or finds its way to a

38dying river that lives on in the memory of spring, the

39smell of muck and weeds that once filled its empty

40belly.

Notes

1] The Poem Attacking Stalin: Joseph Stalin's government arrested Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), a Russian poet, during the 1930s and exiled him and his wife Nadezhdato Cherdyn in the Northern Ural, in effect for daring to write a poemcritical of Stalin. The "Stalin Epigram", composed in 1933, was a critique of "Kremlin mountaineer." Back to Line

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2012

Form

prose poem