Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago
for two friends
Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.
A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.
For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs
The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.
And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.
The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.
The 1965 film version of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is a great film, and the more recent mini-series is good, but these well-intentioned endeavours are but shadows of the book.
See:
Wk kortas
Pennsylvania
W.k. kortas lives and works by the maxim "Mediocre means better than some." The first collection of his poetry, titled The Romeo Letters and Other Poems, is available at Createspace.com and at Amazon.com.
Wk kortas 1h
The De-Commissioned Zhivago
It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.
This piece was inspired by, and can be read as a companion piece to, Lawrence Hall's "On an Inscription from Katya to Gary in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used Book Sale". Obviously, the good Lawrence is to be held blameless in any of the shortcomings of this effort.
#istrelnikovedthisoneupprettybadly