Saint Petersburg Poem by John a'Beckett

The long inviting lets feint fleeters merge, wane
out of synch into '11 o'clock'. West watches show
“What Would Have, Had We Not Been ” enveloping
us on a high meridian malingering in light shadow:
White Nights. Back in Saint Petersburg again

the Baltic's in; ebb tide of history depositing New Man
washed up in fresh form floating down the Neva,
tanned-up, plugged-in, cell-phoned and market-free:
flotsam shuffled to the surface by the fault-line’s fall:
dead rhetoric ideology, a still-receding Soviet sea.

On bar-terrace boats putting down Kanal Kaliva
Captain’s caps, blond girl-friends on display. Tourists glean
elsewhere from statues: Lenin, Dostoyevsky, The Czar:
these figures that we like to think we rather would’ve been
had history, inevitable, not cast us into what we are.