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after Yevtushenko
A Jew, a comedian
who played the President of Ukraine on TV
was so popular
he was elected the President of Ukraine
in real life,
and if that isn`t funny enough,
his country is now being bombed
by Vladimir Putin's army.
As most people know
Jews make good comedians
because we know from suffering,
Jewish humour is salted with irony and sadness
and that`s why we laugh.
Putin doesn`t know from the laugh/cry
connection, no one`s ever actually seen him laugh,
but from tears he knows a lot:
He made them cry in Grozny, in Aleppo, in Abkhazia,
and now he wants them to cry
in Mariupol, Kharkiv and in Kiev too
where 33,000 Jews were gunned down
the first time around. Putin declared
Save Russia from the Yid leader
and de-Nazify Ukraine!
his breath reeking of onions and vodka.
Okay that last part about vodka and onions
is made-up, like an excuse for war,
but he actually said de-Nazify, no joke,
the comedian-Jew president Nazi.
They're saying Putin's gone loco
from isolation,
been hiding in a dark room for more than a year -
I was going to say like Anne Frank
but that wouldn't be right,
at least she was with her family
before the train to Auschwitz then to Bergen-Belsen.
This pandemic's been tough on all of us,
but imagine the loneliness
if you had all those mansions and yachts
and were too paranoid to invite friends,
if you had friends.
These days he won't let anyone get
within 20 feet of him. I hear TV analysts,
they miss the Russian autocrat's more rational side,
his more strategic days,
when cold blooded cruelty made sense
politically-speaking.
Who are They anyway? And what do They know?
And what was the point of bombing
the Holocaust memorial in a Kiev suburb?
And now it's gone.
No monument stands over Babi Yar
for the second time.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone
I am afraid.
2 comments:
As we ponder the notion that truth is stranger than fiction, that things we can't believe could happen are happening, I think back, as you are doing with this poem, to the shock and disbelief people must have experienced hearing about Babi Yar on the news, back in 1941, hearing about the concentration camps, hearing about the atrocities, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. In those days, too, people must have thought they were living in a world of unreality. Perhaps this is a summary of human history ... one unreal event following another.
I love that you invoke Yevtushenko, btw. I am inspired to go back to his poem and re-read it, in light of the current events. I have actually been reading a lot of Ossip Mandelstam's poetry lately. And you may recall that I did a Lion of Poetry episode on Anna Akhmatova ... I like her a lot.
History rhymes... it's sad heartbreaking poetry sometimes
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