Estonia
January 26th, 2006Save as PDF
Ever been to Estonia? Neither have I. This poem depicts a totally imaginary place, rather Soviet and very far away. I think I’m going to do some more poems about places that do exist, but write about them as they appear in my imagination. Real Estonians should not take offense, nor should residents of other nations, continents and cultures I may drastically misportray in the future. Coming up: France and Tasmania, not necessarily in that order.
Estonia
In the endless wintertime
we ice-skate on the black canals
bumping over heads and knees
and elbows embedded in the ice,
our former leaders.
Our flats are never warm enough
although we burn the People’s Daily daily.
In school our scarves and mittens
make a bright red frieze along the wall
and there we study with our brains turned off.
Outside, slow citizens clump by
on brown and ochre streets. The buses
spurt out sooty smudges on the piled-up snow.
The traffic lights are bright
although there is no traffic.
The sky is low. Iron clouds hang overhead
preventing Air France and Swissair
from landing. At the dark station,
empty trains tootle on the dwindling platforms.
Majestically a metal voice calls out departures
to imaginary villages: Vitebsk,
Vilnius, Vienna, and Dnepropetrovsk.
We have no summer. Sailing in the harbor
through the gray-green floes,
refugees perish in July.
Our lugubrious ice sculptures
melt and then refreeze,
forming allegorical criticisms of the state.
At night policemen come and chip
away at them with knives.
There are adults but there are no parents.
At the May Day parade we search for grownups
who resemble us as the People’s Army shuffles past.
Big fur hats conceal the faces of the soldiers
so we barely get a glimpse.
O lost mother, O unknown father!
A scratchy uniform and red kerchief
cannot replace the hugs we never felt,
the familiar stories of your courtship,
your hardships and your small shining victories.
O lonely Estonia, a planet all its own.
The Sun is far away, Earth and all its green
and blue extravagance a bright evening star.
If you Earthlings send your spaceships here,
will our parents shoot them from the sky?
