On Borders

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In every border post
there is 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 trees 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 through,
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 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 for trophies
in the somber vaults of his cave
and with bloodied 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 has grown into an Everest.
The earth was transformed
and became a giant burial place.
While borders still stand
we are all in 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 super power.
My government
is the whole family of man, all new 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.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko excerpts from “Fuku” Translated by Antonia W. Bouis and Albert C.Todd

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This poem was given to me by a good friend many months ago.  I keep the worn copy of the text as a token of our friendship.  I think that it is time that I share the poem with you.

I think that our earth is now divided into what amounts to 21st century fiefdoms.  Those that are known as “first world” countries have accustomed prosperity which is now faltering, though the working classes never really enjoyed the benefits of decent education, good housing, and adequate health care for long.  Mobility between socio-economic classes, working class to middle class is frozen at best, and likely is in retrograde as nearly all of the “new jobs created” are low wage service work.  The middle class, so called, is visibly shrinking.  The “system”, known as capitalism, designed by and for the unambiguous benefit of the wealthy few, — functions with enhanced efficiency under a globalized economy.  The income disparity world-wide between “the haves” and “the have-nots” is canyon-like in scale.

All of this is bad news for the earth, as oceans are warmer, more strewn with plastic refuse.  The atmosphere is significantly warmer, causing as one would expect more violent weather patterns, floods of precipitation in one region, and drought somewhere else.  No small matter, these changes in Nature will affect food supply.  A warming climate now figures in to mass immigration, refugees seeking a place to live that is hospitable to survival.

So what does this have to do with the Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem?  Nation states heretofore characterized as liberal-democratic —  are opting for imperious, father-figure type leaders.  Demagogues who rule by decree appear a handy solution for the stresses, economic, political, existential that everyone, everywhere feels.  Old alliances are crumbling.  The business of implements of war, always good, has never been better. Even a small, impoverished, totalitarian state, North Korea, has nuclear weapons and the means to drop one or more on a North American city.  More alarming to my sense of things is the steady movement of my country toward a police-state, surveillance society.  — a society where the truth is of no account.  The lie-of the-day proffered by our ruler is served up to his servile followers, and the rest of us have little to no means of alternative choice.

That is why it is time to listen to Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

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