Leo Yankevich Poems

Above us: cawing rooks and grey clouds.
Around us: leafless trees and falling snow.
It’s late in January, 60 years
since Gleiwitz-Petersdorf was “liberated.”
...

1.
Beneath the clouds
in the corner of my faithless eyes
seven magpies have stolen away
...

Although they’ve much in common: fear of night,
fear of the hour-glass’s falling sands,
he traps a fleeting moth inside his hands
as it departs the darkness for the light.
...

The leaden marrow shrouds some brighter source.
Its boundaries are jaggéd and fluorescent:
a god’s seaming white schizophrenic shores.
...

Mist lingers on the surface
of stagnant tea-brown water.
The flat bridge spans a mile,
a sea of spatterdocks.
...

The Arctic wind impales us without halt
and in our wounds the devil himself leers.
The star above the gulag burns like salt
until we lose all track of months and years.
...

Where is he now, the poet of
1912? Did he go the way
of Zeppelins that flew above
the Kaiser’s sky of soldat grey,
...

His was not only one more tale of death
read and forgotten by the end of day.
This time I clicked the link, and short of breath,
watched a trembling man begin to pray
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The heart would heal, blood not sour in the veins,
the philosopher's cave not dim in the skull,
the body rise, and in the light, forget its pains,
the once mad apes freed by the glorious wall.
...

The final snow of the year, riddled and hard,
assailed by wind and rain, still covers the field,
while heaven above, a milky upturned ashtray,
lingers like a promise never fulfilled.
...