Poem: Holodomor

 [I wrote this poem many years ago after reading through a large number of oral-tradition accounts from survivors of the Holodomor, as well as a more abstract book on the same topic. 

The word Holodomor in Ukrainian means "death by starvation." This event, for those who have forgotten or never heard, took place in 1930-1933, when about eight million people starved to death, in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union, due to entirely man-made famines. These events took place as the result of Stalin's five-year plan to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. They were entirely caused by Soviet authorities and to an extent weaponized by those same authorities to break the traditional peasantry and nascent resistance and independence movements. The primary cause of starvation was not an absolute lack of food, but the mass collectivization of agriculture (designed to transfer labor to industry) and the forcible mass requisition of grain by Soviet authorities. This grain and other agricultural products was then exported overseas to earn the money and parts and expertise desperately desired to fund new, ambitious industrial projects.

In these events, the Western world played an absolutely necessary role, including the United States, which incredibly chose the year 1933 to recognize the Soviet Union and open trade with it. This rapprochement between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the West was made possible largely by the efforts of (ironically) Western capitalists eager for trade opportunities, as well as numerous writers and journalists producing pro-Soviet propaganda from Moscow and elsewhere and who denied either the existence or extent of the famine or explicitly justified it in the broader interests of Russia's progressive advancement and modernization. The most famous of these journalists was Walter Duranty, whose dismissive quote about breaking eggs opens the poem below. The poem also features numerous other paraphrased quotes from Duranty, contemporary sources, and above all survivors of the famine. 

In the first instance, I offer this poem today as a statement on the present state of the world, and in particular in the face of the unconscionable violence against innocents being carried out throughout the world today: among others in Ukraine by the Russian military, and in Gaza by the Israeli military. In particular, it is offered in response to Western apologists for Israeli war crimes, who in their mix of indifference to suffering innocents, moral cowardice, perverted ideology, and brute self-interest eerily echo their predecessors of the 1930s. In all candor this poem was forcefully brought back to my mind by the remarkable experience of watching Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress.

Regardless of the particular details, and regardless of all copy-book debates over politics, propaganda, fact-checking, geopolitical alliances, nationalism, racism, colonialism, self-determination, self-defense, military policy, international law, existential threats, and/or "moral equivalency," the overall point made by the poem is a deliberately universal and theological one: that every murdered, brutalized, or starved innocent is Christ; and that to be ultimately indifferent to his death is as much as to kill him yourself.]

Holodomor

Murder by starvation

a simple phrase,

a simple tune,

to be glossed over and forgotten.

Making an omelet

takes breaking a few eggs—

so a man said

once upon a time.

The well-coiffed, comfortable people

with their dreams of tolerance and salvation

their love of expediency

their adulations and their triumphs

they have seen You dying on the streets,

your body swollen, your fists clenched,

your eyes glazed over like an animal's,

they saw you, my Lord, and they did not do you the honor

of turning away, denying, or condemning.

They did not say

that you were guilty.

They did not say

that you were not there.

They just said

you were a broken egg

to be spoken of

glossed over

and forgotten

forever.

A stalk of grain

stolen by a little child,

a child shot in the leg

by a guard on horseback.

Did you see this, Mr. Duranty?

The slaughter-house progressives

with their mistresses and their chain-link fences

toast one another among the rafters of a ruined church—

and the noise of screaming children comes on the wind,

and they draw together, like wolves in a pack,

for an instant, and then it is forgotten.

They say, the old woman said,

that we should forget;

but how can one forget such things?

“Mamo, mamo,' she said. But there was nothing to give her.

My mother, they beat her with rods—

when she came back, she lay down, and did not speak again.

We called her, but he said, 'She is dead.'

The boiler-room conservatives, wolves among the pastures,

gather in the halls of an overgrown temple,

spilling red wine on the stones like blood.

My father, they took him away, because he said,

'Is this the regime we fought for?'  

Comfort is a thing like death

only it is not your death

but another's

that you are celebrating.

Why is this wall thicker than the others?  They said.

Then they took the whole family off to Siberia.

The columns were short, it is true,

but interest remained in the Letters to the Editor

for quite some time.

A toast, my friends,

wise-men of the new order,

drunken patriots, practical men,

hard-bitten by theoretical labor

your hands worn with the pushing of pens

across pages white as snow—

when there is a speck that does not fit

what is there to do but gloss over it?

Well have you labored, my dear old friends,

well have you labored for your bloodthirsty god.

You do not understand, the old man said,

they took everything.  

You do not understand

everything.

On with the race!  The rise of a great nation.

When you bet on a horse

that others think will fail

how can you fail to benefit

when it wins after all?

All the horses were dead, and the livestock.

We would tear off handfuls of flesh from them.

If you were larger, you would get a bigger piece.

The Progress of the Human Race,

The Growth of Freedom,

both require the breaking

of a few eggs

from time to time.

'Grain from Ukraine!' the man shouts in the street,

his eyes strange and bright

like an animal's.

You go to take it

but the whole pile is soaked in gasoline

rotting, rotting, rotting

down by the train-station

where the women hold up their infants,

swollen and distended

four children, all left in the street

in the city

to be taken in and fed

(who, my mother said, would not pity a child?)

In the banquet-halls, their bread is thick and hard

and red like blood.

They stuff their faces full of it

as the red tide flows

on and on and on

into the Future

that must be reached

by the most expedient road possible.

Some accuse me, the man says,

his face hollow, his eyes dull like flint,

of some degree of callousness

because I pay less attention than some might like

to the casualties

and more to the victories.

They said in the village

that when you had eaten human flesh

you became like an animal

(I saw it in his eyes, but he said, 'Tell no one!')

In the schools, they said, we live in paradise.

in other places, people even starve to death!

Then we would go home

where there was no food.

I was in bed with my sister

when she died.

My mother called her,

I said, 'She is sleeping.'

But she said, 'She is in the other world.'

__________________________________________________________________

I saw you, my Lord,

in the crossroads of the streets

where dead men lay rotting

in the pits where they tossed

both the living and the dead

(I said, 'there are some alive in the pit.'

But she only said, 'They will be dead soon.')

I saw your face

drawn and distended

where they went to the train-station, begging for food

holding up their infants to the windows of the trains

(the shutters were drawn

as was required

for all trains passing through that region)

I saw you

slumped over and forgotten

where the mother and child 

sat down in the street

and did not rise again

(she said, 'Have you looked into the street again?')

I saw you

--yes, it was you, wasn't it?

In the room

where we sat on my grandfather

who was swollen

so they would not find him and take him away

to the pit alive.

(The youth, he said, are on the side of collectivization)

In the banquet chambers

they howl like dogs and feast on human flesh

on your flesh

taken from the place

where they would dig up bodies to eat

because they took everything.

They took my grandmother's seeds

in little boxes

and when they could not find anything

they would break pots and pans

out of anger.

We had no youth, the old woman said,

because they took everything

everything.

The human heart, she said,

is so small, yet endures so much.

When they said his name,

the room erupted in cheers

for they were cheering not only him

but Russia as well.

My Lord, my God, my Victim

These fragments I have shored against oblivion

these fragments

fragments

My Lord, my God, my Victim,

is it I

who has done this?

Have I, too,

turned aside?

(Yes, it is true some died,

he said,

but it's like going into business

with insufficient capital)

It was not allowed

to talk about Famine

it was against the law.

These voices, my God,

these whispers, my Victim,

so slow to be spoken and remembered

so swift to be forgotten

who can call them from the grey twilight

when the day has passed?

I did not know then

that it was man-made.

They said it was a failed harvest

I don't know what my parents knew

because it was against the law.

(I don't want to think about it

it was a terrible time.)

My God, my God, have you too forgotten?

Or is it only

that I have forgotten you?

They covered the potatoes with white powder

then stirred them with a pole

but we had potatoes in our family

and my mother, she gave them away

to the beggars at the door.

(Your mother gave food to the hungry?  Yes, I saw it all.)

Eloi, Elijah, Teiresias, Moses,

I call to you from the depths

will you not give them

something to eat or drink?

(We would comb the fields

looking for mouse-burrows

and the grain they had stored there)

My Lord, there are so many memories

so many crimes

My Lord, do not let the comfortable people

do you to again

what they did then.

(It was a very good harvest,

but they took away everything)

Victim of ages, will you not cease turning the cheek

will you not turn, and avenge?

(My grandmother said, 'You are young, and break our family's icon?  You should be ashamed.'  If he had been a militiaman, I know she would have died.)

My God, the lying tribe of murderers,

the thieves of truth, who burn your flesh with poles

why will you not do them

as they have done to you

again and again

and again?

(They set up a guard-tower by the grain elevator.  Anyone who came near, they shot.)

Even now, Lord, they deny and they forget

they do not repent, my Lord,

and neither do I.

Why will you spare us, Lord,

when we have done such things to you?

(My mother never saw him again.  But I would go and sit under his window in the prison

and talk to him.  Then they took him away.)

My God, we ask for the chains again

we beg you for them,

we deny and we blaspheme, and will you spare us?

(The capitalists were excited, for a new trade partner was desperately needed.)

I took the potato from my uncle.  

But my parents said, 'It is a sin.  Take it back, and apologize.'  

And so I did.

__________________________________________________________________

Victim of the ages,

Bearer of all suffering,

If you will spare

how can I ask for vengeance?

Yet I have seen the anger of your soul

and the anguish.

Victim of the ages,

Bearer of all suffering,

There is no ending

nor will there be

till justice is brought forth on the earth.

Neither, my Lord, will these eggs remain broken

Nor will the paper remain white

They will drip with blood

Until the day of justice comes.

(There were black flags in the villages

where no one remained alive)

Mercy, O Lord, is what we need

only mercy can undo what has been done

only mercy can give peace to the earth

only mercy can establish justice

and fulfill it.

You must have mercy

upon me

and upon them

and even upon him,

'the greatest liar I ever knew.'

You must have mercy on them, my Lord,

forgive them their sins

and raise them from the dead

only thus

will justice be vindicated

and the liars and murderers not succeed.

My God, I see at last

that justice cannot save the world

but only mercy

justice cannot undo the crime

but only mercy.

Give me mercy, my God,

give them

give to all

a mercy that does not forget

a mercy that endures

a mercy that overcomes

a mercy that fights

until the crime is confessed

and the guilt absolved

until the pain is expressed

and the fear overcome

until the soul is redeemed

and the body raised from the dead.

My God

it is for this

that you died

again

and again

and again

and again

and die to this day.

Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am a sinner.