Here’s a poem I wrote 13 years ago.
Yeltsin appears in the apartment of the poet. Yeltsin’s
been drinking. He pours another. The poem itself is
read in a hoarse whisper, like Roddy McDowell
in “Planet of the Apes”
The Scolding of Yeltsin
Alright:
How often does the sun come up over the hill?
At what point, exactly, does water boil and at
what precise moment did you
unlock those cages?
Someone might have told you
before you stepped into the interregnum
about amnesty to your successors.
Let the living make statues out of them––
bald and bronze. A plaything for pigeons.
Learn this by rote, like a child:
put bullets into co-conspirators
like lightning so that widows
wring their hands in the graveyard
and no men march with staves on the city center
they will never kiss again and
your last breath will
be as President and
in comfort in the
dacha south of Moscow.February 28 1994
© 1995 Daniel X. O’Neil