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ARTS AND CULTURE

Flashback to the coronation scene

  • 10 November 2020
Various poems Samovar

 

Soviet metal urn

transported from Uzbekistan

sputnik falling to earth

landing like a piece of

space junk

in the gulag of the new world

 

a memento

gifted to me

on the passing of two

former Soviet citizens

good people

 

I wonder about the hours it sat simmering

smoky Russian tea

for noble workers

in the workplace canteen

walls lined with glorious images —

a goose step into a five-year plan

a lamp carried into the coalmines of Donbass

a sickle gathers the harvest in Kuban 

the hammer of a carpenter in Moscow

 

a flashback to the coronation scene

Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible

Prokofiev’s Orthodox hymn

voices loom

icons watch, dissenters plot

crowns himself Tsar

showered in gold coins

autocrat of all Russia

 

the great nobility long banished

summer and winter palaces

museums of excess

but revolution’s harvest yielded

new dictators and oligarchs

            thievery continues

 

in a modest apartment

workers arrive home

wipe their brow

on their shirt collar

the samovar boils on

Vasilka Pateras

 

 

Caged

 

I live in a cage in my head where guilt flagellates me raw red, as down memory’s cul-de-sacs I’m led and hindsight’s gristed mill I tread.

I’d enjoy being fiscally free to pursue perspicacity and indulge in philanthropy. But then where’d be my misanthropy?

I live boxed in by obligation that limits choice, invites frustration. To cut through would cause deflation of dreams, reveal fixed station.I’d like to be spiritually deep and take soul-transcendent leapto godhood, in truth and grace keep myself, past pinnacled self steep.

I resign me to this place and time of COVID-19 ragged rhymeand hope for an after, sublime, where I won’t comply with chipped, circled chime.

Barry Gittins

 

 

Thinking outside the box

 

Real power never changes hands

And yet like a spell we cast our votes

In a ballot box for the same corrupt government

A shooting from the old one

Where they practice crop rotation

Fill up their pockets

Making their soils fertile and rich

Making us search for greener pastures elsewhere

Forcing us to think outside the box

Racheal Chie

Vasilka Pateras is a Melbourne-based poet and emerging writer whose work is published in n-SCRIBE and Mediterranean Poetry, The Blue Nib and Poetry on the Move. She regularly reads as part of the Melbourne Spoken Word community. Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer and poet. Racheal is a 23 year old writer, poet, singer, and rapper from Mutare Zimbabwe. Racheal has self published three books, Sweet Deceit, The Indians Child, and Book of Poetry under the name Doreen R. Chitondwe. Racheal's short story ‘Covid as we know it’ was published in The Blue Marble Review and poetry
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