Job Discussion Forums

[Sashadroogie]

The Stone Idol

Dead grasses parched by heat. The steppeland, seared,
Runs on and merges with the sky's pale reaches.
Here is a horse's sun-bleached skull, and here
An idol with its flat, stone features.

How somnolent this face, how roughly hewn
This crude and massive torso! With a sense of
Half-conscious fear I meet its vapid grin,
So timid, so defenseless.

O thing of darkness born! A deity
Were you not once, revered and venerated?
It was not God that made us. It was we
That slavishly the gods created.


Ivan Bunin

[Wilsonthefarmer]

[Sashadroogie]

Easter Day

THROUGH the great sinful streets of Naples as I past,
With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me; till at last
My brain was lightened, when my tongue had said—
Christ is not risen!
Christ is not risen, no,
He lies and moulders low;
Christ is not risen.

What though the stone were rolled away, and though
The grave found empty there?——
If not there, then elsewhere;
If not where Joseph laid Him first, why then
Where other men
Translaid Him after; in some humbler clay
Long ere to-day
Corruption that sad perfect work hath done,
Which here she scarcely, lightly had begun.
The foul engendered worm
Feeds on the flesh of the life-giving form
Of our most Holy and Anointed One.

He is not risen, no,—
He lies and moulders low;
Christ is not risen.

What if the women, ere the dawn was grey,
Saw one or more great angels, as they say,
(Angels, or Him himself)? Yet neither there, nor then,
Nor afterward, nor elsewhere, nor at all,
Hath He appeared to Peter or the Ten;
Nor, save in thunderous terror, to blind Saul;
Save in an after-Gospel and late Creed
He is not risen indeed,
Christ is not risen.

Or what if e’en, as runs the tale, the Ten
Saw, heard, and touched, again and yet again?
What if at Emmaüs’ inn and by Capernaum’s Lake
Came One the bread that brake—
Came One that spake as never mortal spake,
And with them ate and drank and stood and walked about?
Ah! ‘some’ did well to ‘doubt’!
Ah! the true Christ, while these things came to pass,
Nor heard, nor spake, nor walked, nor dreamt, alas!
He was not risen, no—
He lay and moulder low,
Christ was not risen.

As circulates in some great city crowd
A rumour changeful, vague, importunate, and loud,
From no determined centre, or of fact,
Or authorship exact,
Which no man can deny
Nor verify;
So spread the wondrous fame;
He all the same
Lay senseless, mouldering, low.
He was not risen, no—
Christ was not risen!

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
As of the unjust, also of the just—
Yea, of that Just One too.
This is the one sad Gospel that is true—
Christ is not risen.

Is He not risen, and shall we not rise?
Oh, we unwise!
What did we dream, what wake we to discover?
Ye hills, fall on us, and ye mountains, cover!
In darkness and great gloom
Come ere we thought it is our day of doom,
From the cursed world which is one tomb,
Christ is not risen!

Eat, drink, and play, and think that this is bliss:
There is no Heaven but this;
There is no Hell;—
Save Earth, which serves the purpose doubly well,
Seeing it visits still
With equallest apportionment of ill
Both good and bad alike, and brings to one same dust
The unjust and the just
With Christ, who is not risen.

Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved
Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, that had most believed.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
As of the unjust, also of the just—
Yea, of that just One too!
It is the one sad Gospel that is true—
Christ is not risen!

Weep not beside the tomb,
Ye women, unto whom
He was great solace while ye tended Him;
Ye who with napkin o’er the head
And folds of linen round each wounded limb
Laid out the Sacred Dead;

And thou that bar’st Him in thy wondering womb;
Yea, Daughters of Jerusalem, depart,
Bind up as best ye may your own sad bleeding heart:
Go to your homes, your living children tend,
Your earthly spouses love;
Set your affections not on things above,
Which moth and rust corrupt, which quickliest come to end:
Or pray, if pray ye must, and pray, if pray ye can,
For death; since dead is He whom ye deemed more than man,
Who is not risen: no—
But lies and moulders low—
Who is not risen!

Ye men of Galilee!
Why stand ye looking up to heaven, where Him ye ne’er may see,
Neither ascending hence, nor returning hither again?
Ye ignorant and idle fishermen!
Hence to your huts, and boats, and inland native shore,
And catch not men, but fish;
Whate’er things ye might wish,
Him neither here nor there ye e’er shall meet with more.
Ye poor deluded youths, go home,
Mend the old nets ye left to roam,
Tie the split oar, patch the torn sail:
It was indeed an ‘idle tale’—
He was not risen!

And, oh, good men of ages yet to be,
Who shall believe because ye did not see—
Oh, be ye warned, be wise!
No more with pleading eyes,
And sobs of strong desire,
Unto the empty vacant void aspire,
Seeking another and impossible birth
That is not of your own, and only mother earth.
But if there is no other life for you,
Sit down and be content, since this must even do:
He is not risen!

One look, and then depart,
Ye humble and ye holy men of heart;
And ye I ye ministers and stewards of a Word
Which ye would preach, because another heard—
Ye worshippers of that ye do not know,
Take these things hence and go:—
He is not risen!

Here, on our Easter Day
We rise, we come, and lo! we find Him not,
Gardener nor other, on the sacred spot:
Where they have laid Him there is none to say;
No sound, nor in, nor out—no word
Of where to seek the dead or meet the living Lord.
There is no glistering of an angel’s wings,
There is no voice of heavenly clear behest:
Let us go hence, and think upon these things
In silence, which is best.
Is He not risen? No—
But lies and moulders low?
Christ is not risen?


Arthur Hugh Clough

[Wilsonthefarmer]

Christ is Risen and Will Return

THROUGH the great sinful streets of Moskva as I past,
With fiercer cold than winded above my head
My blood was too cold within me; till at last
My heart was blackened, when my tongue had said—
Christ was risen!
Christ was risen, yes,
He lies somewhere in heaven, very high;
Christ was risen and will return.
King Cobra Kulikova


From His eternal seat Christ comes down to this earth,
where, ages ago, in the bitter cup of death He poured
His deathless life for those who came to the call and
those who remained away.
He looks about Him, and sees the weapons of evil
that wounded his own age.
The arrogant spikes and spears, the slim, sly knives,
the scimitar in diplomatic sheath, crooked and cruel,
are hissing and raining sparks as they are sharpened on
monster wheels.
But the most fearful of them all, at the hands of the
slaughterers, are those on which has been engraved His
own name, that are fashioned from the texts of His
own words fused in the fire of hatred and hammered by
hypocritical greed.
He presses His hand upon His heart; He feels that
the age-long moment of His death has not yet ended,
that new nails, turned out countless in numbers by
those who are learned in cunning craftsmanship, pierce
Him in every joint.
They had hurt Him once, standing at the shadow of
their temple; they are born anew in crowds.
Rabindranath Tagore

[Sashadroogie]

Whatever Is

Whatever is we only know

As in our minds we find it so;

No staring face is half so clear

As one dim, preconceived idea—

No matter how the fact may glow.



Vainly may Truth her trumpet blow

To stir our minds; like heavy dough

They stick to what they think—won’t hear

Whatever is.



Our ancient myths in solid row

Stand up—we simply have to go

And choke each fiction old and dear

Before the modest facts appear;

Then we may grasp, reluctant, slow,

Whatever is.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman

[Sashadroogie]

Ode to Stalin

If I were to employ charcoal for highest praise —
For the unalloyed gladness of a picture —
I’d cut up the thin air with the most subtle rays,
Feeling of care and of alarm a mixture.
So that the features might reflect the Real,
In art that would be bordering on daring
I’d speak of him who shifted the world’s wheel,
While for the customs of a hundred peoples caring.
I’d raise the eyebrow’s corner up a bit,
And raise it once again, and keep on trying:
Look how Prometheus has got his charcoal lit ­—
Look, Aeschylus, at how I’m drawing and crying!

I’d make a handful of resounding lines
To capture his millennium’s early springtime,
And I would tie his courage in a smile
And then untie it in the gentle sunshine;
And in the wise eyes’ friendship for the twin,
Who shall remain unnamed, I’ll find the right expression,
Approaching which, you’ll recognize the father — him —
And lose your breath, feeling the world’s compression.
And I would like to thank the very hills
Which bred his hand and bone and gave them feeling:
Born in the mountains, he knew too the prison’s ills.
I want to call him — no, not Stalin — Dzhugashvili!

Painter, guard and preserve the warrior with your paint:
Surround him with a blue and humid forest
Of damp attention. Not to disappoint
The father with images that are unwholesome, thoughtless.
Painter, help him who’s everywhere with you,
Reasoning; feeling; always, always building.
Nor I nor anyone else, but all mankind, that’s who —
Homer-Mankind will raise his praise’s ceiling.
Painter, guard and preserve the warrior with your paint;
The woods of humanity sing after him, growing thicker —
The very future itself, the army of the sage —
They listen to him ever closer, ever quicker.

He leans over from the stage, as from a mount on high,
Into the mounds of heads. The debtor far surpasses
The suit against him: strictly kind the mighty eyes;
The thick eyebrow at someone nearby flashing;
And I would draw an arrow to point out
The firmness of the mouth — father of stubborn speeches;
The plastic, detailed eyelid, and about
Its outline, framing it, a million ridges;
He is all frankness, recognition, copper, and
A piercing earshot, which won’t tolerate a whisper;
At everyone prepared to live and die like men
Come running playful somber little wrinkles.

Squeezing the charcoal in which all has converged,
And with a greedy hand seeking only a resemblance —
Trying to find only the resemblance’s hinge —
I’ll crumble up the coal, pursuing his appearance.
I learn from him, not learning for myself.
I learn from him to show myself no mercy.
And if unhappiness conceals the plan’s great wealth,
I will discover it amid chaos and cursing.
Let me remain as yet unworthy to have friends,
Let me remain unfilled with tears and with resentment;
I still keep seeing him in a greatcoat, as he stands
In an enchanted square, with eyes full of contentment.

With Stalin’s eyes a mountain is pushed apart.
The squinting plain looks far into the distance:
Like a sea without seams, the future from the past —
From a giant plow to where the sun’s furrow glistens.
He smiles a reaper’s smile, the smiling friend,
Reaper of handshakes in a conversation
Which has begun and which will never end
Smack in the middle of all of Creation.
And every single haystack, every barn
Is strong and clean and smart — a living chattel,
A mankind miracle! May life be large.
Listen to happiness’s axis roll and rattle.

And six times over in my consciousness I keep,
Slow witness to the labor, struggle, and harvest,
His whole enormous path — across the steppe,
Across Lenin’s October — to its kept promise.
Into the distance stretch the mounds of people’s heads:
I become small up there, where no one will espy me;
But in kindhearted books and children’s games, instead,
I’ll rise again to say the sun is shining.
The warrior’s frankness: there exists no truer truth.
For air and steel, for love and honor,
One glorious name takes shape on reader’s tongue and tooth,
And we have caught it and have heard its thunder.

Osip Mandelstam

[Sashadroogie]

The Heirs of Stalin

Mute was the marble. Mutely glimmered the glass.
Mute stood the sentries, bronzed by the breeze.
Thin wisps of smoke curled over the coffin.
And breath seeped through the chinks
as they bore him out the mausoleum doors.
Slowly the coffin floated, grazing the fized bayonets.
He also was mute- his embalmed fists,
just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside.
He wished to fix each pallbearer in his memory:
young recruits from Ryazan and Kursk,
so that later he might collect enough strength for a sortie,
rise from the grave, and reach these unreflecting youths.
He was scheming. Had merely dozed off.
And I, appealing to our government, petition them
to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab,
and stop Stalin from ever rising again
and, with Stalin, the past.
I refer not to the past, so holy and glorious,
of Turksib, and Magnitka, and the flag raised over Berlin.
By the past, in this case, I mean the neglect
of the people’s good, false charges, the jailing of innocent men.
We sowed our crops honestly.
Honestly we smelted metal,
and honestly we marched, joining the ranks.
But he feared us. Believing in the great goal,
he judged all means justified to that great end.
He was far-sighted. Adept in the art of political warfare,
he left many heirs behind on this globe.
I fancy there’s a telephone in that coffin:
Stalin instructs Enver Hoxha.
From that coffin where else does the cable go!
No, Stalin has not given up. He thinks he can cheat death.
We carried him from the mausoleum.
But how remove Stalin’s heirs from Stalin!
Some of his heirs tend roses in retirement,
thinking in secret their enforced leisure will not last.
Others, from platforms, even heap abuse on Stalin
but, at night, yearn for the good old days.
No wonder Stalin’s heirs seem to suffer
these days from heart trouble. They, the former henchmen,
hate this era of emptied prison camps
and auditoriums full of people listening to poets.
The Party discourages me from being smug.
'Why care? ' some say, but I can’t remain inactive.
While Stalin’s heirs walk this earth,
Stalin, I fancy, still lurks in the mausoleum.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

[Sashadroogie]

1879 – Stalin – 1949

Holland’s mills, in sombre weighty movement
cast their view upon a low
to carry the grey skies
of the old and passing year.

From the land of reeds and friendly streams
rises the west wind, like a strong young man,
rising up under his own weight,
and conquering both sea and land.

Speak now, words, quietly and charged
with all the power of this wind-swept land
greet the greatest of all comrades
Sing for him this melody of Holland

We know you: to us you are no stranger,
but the one imbued with all the patience
with which the mills, in their grey meadows
are filled, while milling eternally.

We know you for you have the firm
unassailable strength of basalt
that breaks the storm in fierce
with which it assaults Holland’s garden.

We know you, for you are the skipper
with the hard and dark-brown hand
who guides the clipper along marsh and mud-flat
steadily to the safety of the land.

We know you for you have been created
from the same dark clay as we
in which all great images lie asleep
of a people, undivided and free.

With head raised above everyone
but with feet on motherlands’ ground
that supports the lives of thousands
unrestricted and yet in secret bound.

It is from the people that you took your courage
from the people the dream, that keeps them alive
from the people all of the patient desire
from the people the will, that constructs and creates

’Leaders go, but the people live forever’ –
But in the heart of the new order it is
indelibly inscribed:
Stalin, – leader, brother, comrade!


Theun De Vries

[Sashadroogie]

Farewell
Moscow, March 9, 1953

In the mournful silence of the ancient square
Old guards waited, for the final time, comrades, young and old
Fathers held their children higher when the hearse came near
Through the dark throngs of the masses, it glowed like a morning flame
But the proud red flag with which people, happily singing
Had greeted him in bygone years on this same square
Now covered this friend and father, laying in his deepest sleep
As the sombre tones of mournful music sounded.
On the shoulders of his nearest he was carried one more time
He, who taught them liberation and to live in freedom
He, Lenin’s pupil and comrade through the difficult years
Was taken again to Lenin’s side in the comradeship of death
Cannons boomed lonely, all work and labour ceased
To Red Square they flocked likes doves to a dovecot
The thoughts of millions, their vows filled the air
For the dead hero, who now rests from his superhuman work
He will rest, he will sleep, but what he created holds power and breathes
Among the people it lives, it stirs them to heroic acts
Until no hiding place can be found where slavery can thrive
Until the brotherhood of people can celebrate Stalin’s name in peace


Theun De Vries

[Wilsonthefarmer]

It seems you forgot that Osip Mandelstam died in the camps of Stalin in 1938!.

"Only in Russia is poetry respected--it gets people killed"
Osip Mandelstam


EPIGRAM AGAINST STALIN
by Osip Mandelstam

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away.
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man.
His greasy fingers are thick as worms,
his words weighty hammers slamming their target.
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker,
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.

Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.

Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.

—Translated by Esther Allen from José Manuel Prieto’s Spanish version

[Sashadroogie]

I have not forgotten anything. Take the time to check back a page or two and you'll see that that very poem has already been posted up, although not a second-hand translation like your one.

[Sashadroogie]

The Hole in Ilyich’s Boots

You, who are sculpting a statue of Ilyich
Twenty metres high, at the Palace of the Trades Unions
Do not forget that in his boot
There was the hole, attested by many, a sign of poverty.
I hear to be sure, he faces
The West, where many live, who in the hole in the boot
Will recognise Ilyich as
One of their own.

Bertolt Brecht

[Sashadroogie]

In Praise of Communism

It's quite straightforward, you'll understand it. It's not hard.
Because you're not an exploiter, you'll easily grasp it.
It's for your own good, so find out all about it.
They're fools who describe it as foolish, and foul who describe it as
foulness.
It's against all that's foul and against all that's foolish.
The exploiters will tell you that it's criminal,
But we know better:
It puts an end to all that's criminal.
It isn't madness, but puts
An end to all madness.
It doesn't mean chaos
It just means order.
It's just the simple thing
That's hard, so hard to do.

Bertolt Brecht

[Wilsonthefarmer]

Anti Communist Poetry!

Is there anybody out there?
Would you care if there were?
Under a red flag of pretend.
They are horse and you are spur.

A man named Karl once wrote a book.
And it looked real good on paper.
But it's one thing for a man to take a look.
And another thing to rape her.

Based on good and pure ideas.
But like love giving away to lust.
A goverment of the people.
Is not something you can trust.

A Man of Steel once said .
"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."
Was he just being realistic?
Or was 20 million too much.
That he just simply lost touch.
And like Ned Kelly thought "life was such".

What of the man named Mao?
You never here of him now.
Killed seven times more than Hitler.
So if the shoe fits ya'.
When you think red, think dead and don't bow.

[Sashadroogie]

Name of this talented poet, please? Or do Stormfront members not have them?