MUTATIS MUTANDIS
Pondering the political re-ordering & shape-changing that must follow in the eventual wake of the war in Iraq, I thought about the extraordinary events that were taking place with such whirlwind energy in Russia when I visited in the late '80s. I spent time in the hitherto closed city of Sverdlovsk, now Ekaterinburg once more, which rests on the invisible divide between Europe & Asia. Amongst the shabby appartment blocks & on stretches of wasteground huge billboards stood & from them Lenin watched the ancient world drifting back &, simultaneously, the new one checking in.
GRASSCUTTERS AT SVERDLOVSK, 1988
Across the wide flat road, potholed
all the way to Moscow, we were told,
grasscutters move like dreamers through a gauze
of dust. An old man stoops and draws
the dry stalks into shocks. And, following, a child
hefts a pitchfork twice his size, hoists the piled
grass onto a flatbed cart. Between the shafts
a cartoon horse lifts its tail through drafts
of summer flies. Behind, at the other side
of wasteground, raised on a crooked tide
of flats and billboards, Uncle Lenin’s gazing
po-faced from the recent past, appraising
the shifting landscape, long skyline
and a red sun sinking fast. Wall-eyed, he’s blind
(now, as ever) to the eternal – the slow
cycle of a young man’s scythe, the scavenger crow
following the mowers, the new wind that turns
the scarlet faces of the poppies. Lenin burns
briefly in the sunset, then the shadows blur
the certainty of his smile, confer
upon the tombstone flats the anonymity
of dusk. Rocked home in the tram, we
the free spirits from the wild west,
yearn for the old world – a horse at rest,
the stacking of the sheaves, the silent drift
of harvesters effacing the bright, swift
water-words of capital and labour. It seems
the only certainty, this gathering-in of our early summer dreams.
6:41:17 PM 
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