He looks hither, thither and then afar
to question the shocked silence of his fear.
Above him reigns a scintillating star,
wrought in the dark sky like an icy tear.
He moves between plots of freshly-dug earth
with the cautioned step of a wounded fox,
and discovers traces of that second birth
which calls pale men to the funerary box.
Dead, interred but yet forgotten so soon
no grave bore the name of him who once was.
Like a stolen kiss beneath a full moon,
these men were disposed of without a pause.
This is what terrified the aging Pushkin so.
Death itself inspired no unusual woe.
But he lamented those names lost in snow.
May 19, 2016
May 19, 2016 at 11:27 PM UTC
He looks hither, thither and then afar
to question the shocked silence of his fear.
Above him reigns a scintillating star,
wrought in the dark sky like an icy tear.
He moves between plots of freshly-dug earth
with the cautioned step of a wounded fox,
and discovers traces of that second birth
which calls pale men to the funerary box.
Dead, interred but yet forgotten so soon
no grave bore the name of him who once was.
Like a stolen kiss beneath a full moon,
these men were disposed of without a pause.
This is what terrified the aging Pushkin so.
Death itself inspired no unusual woe.
But he lamented those names lost in snow.
(c) 2016. All rights reserved.
The idea of for this poem occurred to men when I heard an anecdote about the Russian author Pushkin. Evidently, he had a terrible fear of un-marked graves. This poem, then, is an aesthetic reconstruction of an hypothetical scenario: Pushkin meeting the object of his fear.
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