Basia said
If I had a magic fish that gave you seven wishes
my first wish would be for golden shoes and a new
pretty frock.
Or that I didn’t have to learn Russian at school
You couldn’t remember the rest of the wishes
Kasia your mother was wishing for the end of
Communism
And the release of your father
from jail
As Jaruzelski sent in the tanks to impose
Martial Law December 1981
You lay in bed listening to them rumbling down
the street and shaking the houses along the way
I was back in England writing poems on beer
mats..
Banging my fists on the table demanding Revolution
My mother had fled in the 1930s
From a different enemy but with the same claws
of steel that tore,crushed and killed
Back In the bar
I had written a poem about Mayakovsky
got drunk on vodka
and climbed into bed with a woman who
told me I was sexy when I was angry
and had a voice
that sounded like a stream curling around
rocks.
or like a dollop of syrup being spread on toast
i think she was stoned
when you lent across and killed the electric light
I recited the poem I wrote for hooligan poet Vladimir
In the dark
on my back looking upwards
I recited
“They are making steel from morning to night –
Turning the sky into a cauldron of fiery red.
The Worker’s sweat and toil will lubricate the wheels of the revolution.
Make us all equal men and women like strong trees under the winter sun …
Take off your red bloomers women in the fields and
wave a flag of radical reform
Do it comrades because it makes me as horny as hell”
If I could have given you your golden shoes
I would have done so
Used failing Communism to wrap up your pretty frock.
as if it were little more than wrapping paper
With a magic wand made the tanks disappear
and the streets sigh and return to silence
when memories collide across time
and people who haven’t met are waiting –
perhaps peeling an apple watching a cartoon
scanning a swathe of almond coloured sky
wishing daydreams were time machines
not knowing that the future will fuse them together
like light crashing through stain glass
changing lives forever
.
Malcolm Paul