Three Poems

Laika

Space dog of Moscow,

In my school books I learned

That you orbited the earth – yet I never 

 asked how you returned.

I learned only late,

 in my twenty-seventh year

That you didn’t survive at all -- 

My God, the fear

You must have felt then, in hundred-plus heat

 The loneliness of that death, the impossible feat

Of unchosen courage, stranded above the earth

Not knowing how long

  The pain would last, or whence its source

Sometimes I think

 that your incomprehensible fate

Is as grave or graver an indictment

  Of every worker’s state

  And every five year plan and

 five minutes’ hate

Than the very foulest splurge

  Of Stalin’s great purge --

As well as of the misnamed human-

 “kind” in general

 That enclosed you in Sputnik II,

And of every sapient ameliorative scheme

  That cannot redeem

 This thing that was done to you.

Hundred Flowers Campaign

"The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science."

 -- Mao

Of course you should speak openly

 You were told

Has the party not always welcomed criticism?

 What hope can there be

For us to do better

 If we do not even know

What needs to improve?

So you raise your hand

 Only to discover

 That the promised openness was for someone else

Or for some other

 Words than whatever it was

You just shared

  (All this conveyed instantaneously

    through blank yet menacing stares)

And you say you had not meant to

  Condemn the leaders in the slightest

You had not realized, forgive you,

 That your words were those

 Of a rightist!

I once heard tell

 From a professor of German

There is a habit in her country of taking

 One’s employees out for drinks

 In the course of which one tells them

“Henceforward, you may address me as Du!”

A tantalizing taste of familiarity, more frightening

And deadly at last than tyranny

Because everyone was drunk when the promise was made

And, next morning, no one knows

 Whether to regard it as true.

Poor Princes

"Trump takes two scoops of ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, TIME reported, while everyone else around the table gets just one."

-- CNN

When I see the pin of Kim Jong-Il or -Un’s face

Gracing the front of every North Korean shirt,

  I reflect

That this is exactly the sort

Of society based around himself that our current president

 Would like to erect

Given half a chance.

And are they not similar?

 The dictators of Pyongyang and Mar-

 a-Lago, they were all

 Poor princes, cursed

 With wealth and power and illusions of

 Immortality and importance

  From day one

They never had a chance.

And it wouldn’t be so scary if there were a range of views

 On whether or not

he’d try it

  (Kim Jong-Unifying the land, that is)

But horror of horrors: his most ardent supporters,

  Would not, I don’t think

 Deny it.