Russia

And in this dream I see
(borrowed from a weaver)
the sightless, sipping their siesta tea
(stolen from a reaper)

For Russia has no siestas
and revolutions, thus no name
And winds traversing intercontinental
No bullets that can tame.

These eyes are old
For they have seen
Chekhov, Tolstoy, Nabokov
try and redeem
the colours of the pen
and lands abroad, when
their own was green
with envy
and red with thoughts
and roses a hundred
blooming, colliding
uniting a kindred
of a nascent regime
of the ruled.

And in this dream, I see
the sixth of November
Across the polar Pacific
of shipwrecks that remember
how one human's dream
is another's nightmare
and this is all I have to say
that there are but
two, before I fall silent.

And before these eyes were shut
the last vision they recall
taken from last October
the beginning of the Fall,

                        - a truck brushing past
                            a low lying branch of a banyan tree
                           (For there are no banyan trees in Russia)
                         and I see this lone
                           last leaf fall while
                         the sightless
                            rejoice, for they hear nothing_-_-

And then I shut my eyes.