Song of the Dnieper Fisherwoman
An Elegy on the Ukraine Crisis
In the great rivers that run through our dreams,
divide the continents, delineate
rain-woven mountain ranges,
we search the watersheds from which emerge
the slow formation of thought.
Out of their haunted breath
language tumbles, splashing
stones slowly worn to unpredictable
polished gravel teeth
in the tongue of unrelenting currents
like a god playing flute in the forest.
Since the beginning they turn and widen,
collecting tributaries,
deposit cities in the floodplains, move
the boundary stones of epochs,
a vast orchestral intelligence,
a fisherwoman singing in the dawn.
1.
Let’s go back to the beginning
to the glacial upheavals,
to the breaking of ice:
to the forested hills north of Moscow,
to the peat mineral wells
where all broad rivers of Russia rise,
to a weaver’s hut on the moor.
That’s where she sets out her song, arranging
primary threads on the loom,
the aboriginal mother
of the Kalevala poets.
After the flood when the three sons of Noah
divided the earth among their descendants,
from the shores of Ladoga to the banks of Novgorod
three sons of the Slavic forest
hunting the white eagle, descended the rivers
to the corners of the world,
to the three seas,
to the kurgan steppe, encountering
migrating tribes from the east.
Varangians came… Or let us begin the tale
in this manner, brothers: when Andrew
carried the origin of all words
to the ancient Greek city on the Black Sea,
to the place where Vladimir would enter the waters,
where the sea held back the way
every year to an underwater grotto,
to the place where Clement fell silent at last
and his silence was worth more than all his words,
he saw that the mouth of Dnieper was nearby.
Conceiving an inspiration to know
what was this river, what peoples it fed,
what they could become if washed in its waves,
a lineage of right-believing kings along
its banks as far as Valaam in Ladoga,
Andrew said: do you see these hills, brothers?
Do you see the holy wisdom that will be built here,
the kind of labors dug out of these caves?
Few in this world will ever understand it.
2.
The way that water moves,
gentle, inquisitive, undeterred
with sinuous equations caressing
the granite base of pinnacles to sand in its hands,
foretells the direction of all our highways
and the shape of human converse.
At the foundation of thought is a song
and at the foundation of song
in first light the Dnieper fisherwoman
rows out to see where the current will take her.
All night her forethought formed in dreams
provisons for such a journey.
Searching the wide-spread eloquence of waters
quiet as the heron to catch one glimpse,
a silver counter-movement
subsidiary to the melodic translucence
to drop her nets into.
Her search is fed by histories she knows
and histories she does not know
in the river’s tremendous reach back in time
farther than any remembrance,
not even those whom her ancestors forgot:
the song of the Don Cossacks
who stand and die at the gates of Kharkiv,
who search the rubble for children lost.
3.
One clear artesian upwelling
where poets dipped their tongues
in the mighty chronicles of flood
expands in waterfalls,
chords swelling up through masterful fingers
like tales of heroes born along these banks,
like the old epics hold their grip all through
the creative topography of our dreams.
Let us sing of Askold and Dir
as Boyan the Seer sang
on the hill above the Don
for the boyars of Prince Igor
on the night before battle,
one hand dancing hard over the gusli,
the other thrust toward toward stormclouds
that bring thunder to feed the rivers.
Like a thunderbolt, like the progenitor of storms
the Viking ships appeared
on the Sea of Marmara.
Raiders, sometimes traders
with amber, timber, honey from the forest rivers
for Byzantine gold; but when they saw
the glory of Byzantium, they said,
this is the goal of all our wanderings,
to take this city and its riches
to become whatever it is that can shape such wonders.
At the source of all thought is an invocation,
a litany of peace, a cry for deliverance.
Photios on the walls of Miklagard
held up the ancient icon
and the Mother of God unfolded her protecting veil,
but the Rus saw visions of judgment written in lightning.
Ships rammed each other in terror to escape,
and to the end of their days
pondered on what they had seen.
Now the tanks rumble across the Dnieper
where Olga planted her churches
on Askold’s burial mound.
“These are our own mothers and brothers;
we shall take their seaports with much slaughter,
bomb their maternity hospitals and childrens’ shelters,
raise our tank cannons in salute
to cremate them in their own homes.
Ukraine will never forget our fatherly benevolence.”
You priests sing and you people praise,
police tie down your tongues with a blood-red gag.
4.
In the sediments of thought
we lay the foundation of our bridges,
erect our superstructures,
steel philosophies at angles to the light,
eroded meanings of heroes painted over
with idealogical revisions
through dark swamps cut off from the current
where Baba Yaga weaves her torturous waterways
in the scarred geography of cataclysmic eruptions.
In slow putrifaction
the drink grows poison.
5.
Or might it behoove us, brothers,
to begin in ancient strains
the grievous lay of Prince Igor’s campaign?
Then let us begin
according to the events of our time
and not according to the prophecies of Boyan.
For he, Boyan the seer,
when composing a song for someone,
soared in his thoughts over the trees,
flew below the clouds as a blue-gray eagle.
When he recalled the feuds of former times
he would let loose ten falcons upon a flock of swans.
And the first swan overtaken
was the first to sing a song
to Yaroslav the Wise,
to Mstislav the Brave.
Let us begin this narration, comrades
from the old times of Vladimir
to this present time of another Vladimir.
Igor looked up at the bright son
and saw that all his warriors
became enveloped in darkness.
And Prince Vladimir the New spoke to his warriors:
“Comrades and warriors!
It is better to be killed in battle
than to let this people escape becoming our captives!”
And the prince’s mind was seized with ambition.
And the desire to drink from the great river Dnieper
concealed the evil omens from him.
“I want, O my Russians,
either to drink with you Dnieper from my helmet,
or to leave my tanks there.”
It is not a storm that has driven
the falcons over the wide prairie.
It is a formation of fighter jets
racing toward the first city of Kievan Rus.
And Prince Vladimir the New set his foot in the rocket launchers
and rode into the open prairie.
The sun barred his way with darkness
and night, moaning with the tempest, awoke the birds.
The whistling of the hypersonic missiles arose
and the Div arose and from the treetops it cried.
6.
What a glorious day on the Moskva,
the people stood on tanks in Red Square.
When the sons of Mstislav fled back to the northern forests;
when Yuri of the Long Arm tore down the oaks
for the first stockade on this tributary of Volga,
Dmitri, hero of the Don, obedient
to the pillar of fire for the Russian forests Sergei,
was first to fight off the Mongol invaders.
He surrounded this fortress with white-stone walls adorning
the Moscow Kremlin with temples to the Mother of God.
She spread Her protecting veil
through the light-inheriting frescoes of Rublev.
Not on the walls of Miklagard, but of Moscow,
not Photios but Cyprian, master of the pure, unceasing
invocation at the the source of existence,
took hold of Her ancient icon from Vladimir,
Monomakh’s icon from Byzantium long ago,
Andrei the God-loving prince’s icon,
Alexander of the Neva River’s,
and he wept: “We have no other protection!”
She took her stand on the banks of Don
showed Her majestic countenance to Tamerlane.
In terror he crept back into the steppes.
Now in the ruins of Mariupol they cry for Her intercession.
These were princes
mature in the sanctified humanity of prayer,
these were the princes of Kievan Rus,
leaders who showed what a man could become,
inspiring men to lay down even their lives.
These were among the last who carried in their hearts
the blood of Olga and Vladimir the Enlighteners.
If a Time of Troubles followed, it was never
so repressive a shadow as in the days of Stalin
that this more violent Vladimir remembers
so fondly, sending fury from Belarus,
young men who know not what they do,
another Sviatopolk the Accursed, the Fratricide.
We thought he might weave together
the broken geography of the rivers,
we though he might make Russia whole again.
We didn’t realize he would open the gates of hell.
At the origin of all thought is an invocation,
incense rising in the tall cathedral
to the ring of standing Archangels
radiating from the face of the Pantocrator
where a cruise missile came through the dome.
7.
I can still hear
those ancient melodies from forest and steppe,
the holy wisdom in the watersheds
in which her first thought moved in countermeasure,
one pure invocation
at the origin of our existence:
the elegy of the rivers she sang
as she turned to the road of exile,
wandered through ruin into the rain
of indiscriminate gunfire.
It is not her empty boat that drifts down
past Kherson into the hushed Black Sea,
it is a floating casket, one
of many thousands, in slow procession.
Mothers along the shore, Ukrainian and Russian,
weeping raise the song
of the Dnieper fisherwoman.
Russia, Holy Russia! What have you done?
Turn back into the season of the sacred Lenten repentance;
beg our merciful Creator,
give peace to world, calm the raging of nations,
keep well the tombs of these cities until
their youth is renewed in the land of Resurrection.
Orthodox Illumination 