40 years ago this was written & I translated it. More than 50 years before
that in 1917...
YAAK KARSUNKE
FLOWER POWER
1917
it was too much for Lenin, he succeeded
in bringing about that famous,
in the meantime already historical,
flowerily non-violent march
on the winter palace, went himself
smiling, wreathed with cornpoppy
at the head of the march, all the time
chewing sunflower
kernels - naturally - echt Russian
the Tsar's police
sprayed the demonstrators
with sheaves of
sharp shots, they mowed
down Lenin and Trotsky, Zinoviev
Kamenev, Radek, Bucharin - they were
all shot, so it didn't help
very much that also
Comrade J. Stalin met his death
: but beautiful, up to the present day
has remained the garden of Tsarskoye Selo
in which the Romanov crown prince
(like the lad decapitating thistleheads)
already practises the ripping up
of weeds, while his father
still smiling snips the red
red roses, still
1969
Note: "dem Knaben gleich, der Disteln köpft", is an image from Goethe's
"Prometheus", a portrait of a rebel from the early Sturm und Drang phase of
G's career. (Both Schubert and Wolf composed mighty settings of it.)
Prometheus is mocking Zeus for blasting oaks and mountain summits - the
Romanov heir is doing the same to the weeds in Karsunke's ironic elegy.
_______________________________________
But I am but a nameless sort of person
(A broken Dandy lately on my travels)
And take for rhyme, to hook my rambling verse on,
The first that Walker's Lexicon unravels
- George Gordon, Lord Byron
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