We Are Witnessing the Greatest Russian Tragedy. Now.

Some twenty-seven million Soviets,

twenty-seven million of the beautiful people

fell as sealed and scattered seeds to earth

in the Great Patriotic War with the Beast.

Those were born as one-time Phoenixes

to the timber made of souls, strings, hearts

in the “Orthodox” melodies and songs

I can hear still Orphic romances and dirges,

some of the world’s deepest harmonies

by which the cosmos wanted to array

mankind’s stream and strife and hopes.

 

Oh, what then about the beautiful and its very soul?

How did that vanish so soon—after winning

at such a price and sacrifice the greatest of all wars?

Oh, do or ever did such heroic and beautiful souls

have a place where these were mocked and even denied

in the doctrine that cast the human as a concrete cadre,

as a soulless bloc made to suit a petite bureaucratic mind

for which all was matter, discipline, and iron order only?

What did a Khrushchev or a Brezhnev know or care

about things of the spirit, the soul and the beautiful

or about how gone heroes live or die, if uncared, upon their fall?

 

And how a lot more less is there left for a beauty and grace of souls

when everyone who wasn’t sold or bought knows that Putin’s bros

and Putin himself are the country’s and the nation’s assassins

and when the latter himself boasts that, under him, Russia is the first

now in the world for having “absolutely the best prostitutes of all,”

if not in the absolute numbers of ex-KGB oligarch-billionaires

made of the planned destitution and degradation of the nation

and of Russia’s plotted, plodding, cashed-in liquidation

under Vlasov’s flags unfurled amid Nazi wartime ranks?

Where can society’s depraved bottom once with total power

lead the country and the state if not to a hole that ends in Hell?