The Border Between Good And Evil
Recently I was troubled by an email exchange with a friend. He supported the removal of children from parents seeking asylum at our southern border. I called it kidnapping, and insisted such acts were atrocities. He disagreed. His argument was that these parents were neer-do-wells intent on defrauding our government. Therefore they deserve to have their children removed and placed in detention camps.
This poem is dedicated to my friend.
ON BORDERS
A Verse from “Fuku”
by Yevgeny Yevtsushenko
In every border post
there’s something insecure.
Each one of them
is longing for leaves and for flowers.
They say
the greatest punishment for a tree
is to become a border post.
The birds that pause to rest
on border posts
can’t figure out
what kind of tree they’ve landed on.
I suppose
that at first, it was people who invented borders,
and then borders
started to invent people.
It was borders who invented police,
armies, and border guards.
It was borders who invented
customs-men, passports, and other shit.
Thank God,
we have invisible threads and threadlets,
born of the threads of blood
from the nails in the palms of Christ.
These threads struggle though,
tearing apart the barbed wire
leading love to join love
and anguish to unite with anguish.
And a tear,
which evaporated somewhere in Paraguay,
will fall as a snowflake
onto the frozen cheek of an Eskimo.
And a hulking New York skyscraper
with bruises of neon,
mourning the forgotten smell of plowlands,
dreams only of embracing a lonely Kremlin tower,
but sadly that is not allowed.
The Iron Curtain,
unhappily squeaking her rusty brains,
probably thinks:
“Oh, if I were not a border,
if jolly hands would pull me apart
and build from my bloody remains
carousels, kindergartens, and schools.”
In my darkest dreams I see
my prehistoric ancestor:
he collected skulls like trophies
in the somber vaults of his cave,
and with the blooded point of a stone spearhead
he marked out the first-ever border
on the face of the earth.
That was a hill of skulls.
Now it is grown into an Everest.
The earth was transformed
and became a giant burial place.
While borders still stand
we are all prehistory.
Real history will start
when all borders are gone.
The earth is still scarred,
mutilated with the scars of wars.
Now killing has become an art,
when once it was merely a trade;
From all those thousands of borders
we have lost only the human one—
the border between good and evil.
But while we still have invisible threads
joining each self
with millions of selves,
there are no real superpower states,
Any fragile soul on this earth
is the real superpower.
My government
is the whole family of man, all at once.
Every beggar is my marshal,
giving me orders.
I am a racist,
I recognize only one race—
the race of all races.
How foreign is the word foreigner!
I have four and a half billion leaders.
And I dance my Russian,
my death-defying dance
on the invisible threads
that connect the hearts of people.
Translated by Antonia W. Bouis and Albert C.Todd
