Along the Volga

Autumn dares us to believe in her again.
Ditch waters will be covered with glassy ice.
Hissing outstretched winds
rack through cherry trees,
snapping us out of lethargy.

We will retake silence
to soothe our peacetime on bogs in forests
after our war elegies
beat back the fields of bones
of a foreign army.
Painters on greensward shores
wait for Picasso’s dove.

It was on this river,
conjugating verbs
in Latin, English and French,
a child asked for paper.

On a city bench he composed
an atonal song
from entangled voices
of gulls and blackbirds.
He longed for a telescope
to explore the nebulae
of another sky’s universe.