Epode (Aftersong)
by Robert Couldry
‘Goldfinch, do you know you’re a goldfinch,
do you know how much?’
– Osip Mandelstam, quoted from the ‘Voronezh Notebooks’, 1937
From Butyrka, the train forges on, for weeks on end, across dense taiga, frosted earth.
Unsleeping rivers, brittle skies hurtle by, barely registered.
Finally, in a floodlit Siberian railway yard, the train unloads
an endless skein of broken men, shuffling in the dust and metal.
In the grip of a formidable fate, you have given up on survival,
but not on truth, you have not given up on poetry.
You are that goldfinch, always ready to sing,
always aware of the milky, spectral tone of your song.
On a fetid, feverish bunk, you’ve weighed the cost of duelling the dictator.
For Nadia, your beloved, another cost, the burden of grief.
At a Moscow prison, her parcel of food and clothing is returned unopened.
‘Addressee is dead’. ‘Next’.
Not only did she love you, she knew the lineage of language,
the fault line of poetry, the fissure where strophe meets antistrophe,
where both meet catastrophe.
Nesting in her memory, your poems were nurtured for decades, recited silently,
as prayers, incantations, secreted in teapots, vases, nondescript cupboards.
The hidden manuscripts were coded as ‘goldfinches’, prescient, terminal.
Do you know you’re alive,
do you know how much?
Winter closes in. Days stagnate, nights grate.
Beds crawl with typhus. Boots scrape on stone.
What salve, what halo, can still your fitful sleep?
The ripe flesh of a poem, vowels like nectar, consonants spitting and crackling,
maybe an elysian morning in Voronezh, a rare feast of egg and sausage
and the earthy smell from cartloads of hay.
Yes, your muse is beside you, a scented aura cradling your heart,
rumpling the bed-sheet, her candour, her joy, her irreproachable goodness.
Under a balsamic moon, you read poems for the camp mafia.
In phantasmagoria, even hardline criminals can cherish poetry,
their drunken, raucous clamour cuts the night,
‘Read it again’, they urge, ‘the one about the soldier’, ’the one about the wasps’.
Your faint grin, gimlet gaze reflect the candle glow.
On the last day, trying to eat weevil-infested bread, an inmate interrupts,
‘Save it for later’. You look up, wide-eyed, with sudden clarity, with sudden serenity,
‘When later’, you murmur, knowing there is no later.
Somewhere, along the way to eternity
a light breaks through
After this, after all, the ‘goldfinches’ still sing, this the epode, the aftersong.
Robert Couldry aka Dhiraj, born in England, has travelled widely in many countries including India, Tibet, Myanmar and Ethiopia and now lives in Australia. He self-published 2 collections of poetry in recent years, ‘The Cymbal Clash of Sky: Poems from Tibet’ and ‘Depart Into a New Tenderness’ and is about to publish another collection of poems and a poetic/photographic memoir of Myanmar.