ABRUPTO

09:58 (JPP)

EARLY MORNING BLOGS 488

The Secret Work

Nadezhda Mandelstam has told the story. In Strunino, after her husband's arrest, working the night shift in a textile factory, she runs, sleepless and distraught, among the machines, chanting his forbidden poems to herself to preserve them. And so for twenty-five years in Perm, in Moscow, in Voronezh, Leningrad, Ulyanovsk, Samatikha...

A man with chills hugs himself,
rejoicing in his fever. She,
the frozen century's daugher, rejoices
in her secret, hugs to herself
the prophet hiding in her breath,
the infant she keeps close, safe, swaddled,
speaking.
She covers over, makes him
smaller, safer, no bigger than
a seed, a spark—search where they will,
they will not find him here, yet here
he is, a little voice praying,
an enormous voice prophesying,
this live coal held on her tongue
burning behind clenched teeth.

To herself, in herself, over
and over, what must not
be said aloud, not written down,
not whispered in corners or left
to be smelled out clotting
at the ends of broken phrases
...the poems of Mandelstam
going out in Siberia's night.

(Irving Feldman)

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Bom dia!