Tuesday Poem: Notes From The Futurist Project

You float like a cloud in trousers

I stand with my cow in the rain



Your poems electrified Russia

Your dams were a hymn to the rain



Your empire crumbled around us

As here and as gone as the rain



The birch tree lies by the roadside

Its branches are wept by the rain



The smoke of my village drifts upwards

Its ashes retreat from the rain



Your red square has entered the market

Its cobbles are slick with the rain



The future lies inside the present

As close as a cloud and its rain.



Credit note:First published in Lynx XXI:1, Feb 2006.



Tim says: This is my one and only published attempt at a ghazal. I don't think it's as fleet-footed as the ghazal by Mary Cresswell I posted last week, and in fact, I'd almost forgotten I'd written it - but then poet and photographer Madeleine Slavick kindly sent me an article by John Berger about the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, which touched on Mayakovsky's 'frenemy' relationship with his contemporary, the Russian peasant poet Sergei Esenin (sometimes rendered as Yesenin).



To simplify greatly, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky tried to build the urban future in his poetry, while Esenin tried to preserve the rural past. Neither succeeded in life, though both did in art. Both died young and by their own hand.



In this poem, Esenin is the narrator, and Mayakovsky is the "cloud in trousers", as he once referred to himself.



You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog - the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week's other poems are linked from the right-hand column.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.