OZET

Texts

Tamaz’s Song

In our fortieth year,
in the late nineteen sixties
when we hadn’t passed Saturn
and the sun shone upon us,
in Blagoveshchensk
which is now Village Twenty,
lived a man and his son
and his grandson together.

Just try to imagine
an OZET so different:
where children know parents
and serve them and love them.
And try to imagine
that blood is still greedy
and air hard to come by
and food even scarcer.

With wings on each morning,
he sets out for Albazin
which is now Village Fourteen.
He sits with a quorum
of old men like him
who remember the Volga
and how one could ache
from the effort of walking.

They read from a book
that was smuggled in pieces
from earth, then stitched back together.
They argue the meaning
of things said on mountains:
the word in the desert.

Believe me, my cousins,
that life isn’t always
like what came before it:
The soil is changed by each harvest.

At home, in his hammock,
his son hasn’t risen.
He sags in the darkness
and curses the father
who traded his birthright
of meadows for nothing
but stories and statutes
and stale incantations.

With hours of driving
a shovel before him.
The vacuum above him,
a vacuum inside him,
he boils a porridge
of buckwheat and leaves it:
his son is still growing
and trusting, and needs it.

Believe me, my cousins,
that life isn’t always
like what came before it:
The soil is changed by each harvest.
The child is not like his father.

The grandson is dreaming.
A boy he knows told him
they’re building a city in the desert.
He’s there, under towers
where laws will be written.
He dreams he can climb these mountains.

The soil is changed by each harvest.
The child is not like his father.
The law is rewrit with each judgement.

Something’s lost,
something’s gained.