Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, VOLGA, by WILSON PUGSLEY MACDONALD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

VOLGA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Age is in their wasted features
Last Line: What the master, jesus, said.
Subject(s): Russia; Volga River, Russia; Soviet Union; Russians


AGE is in their wasted features;
Terror dulls their piercing cries:
Little children, loved of Jesus,
Falling, nevermore to rise.
Look, the sunlight now is pouring
In their cups of sunken eyes!

We, who feel our tables groaning
With their wealth of meat and grain,
What care we of gentle children
By the breath of famine slain?
What to us the tombless graveyards
On Samara's frozen plain?

All day long the white-rimmed Volga
With a ghastly meal is fed.
All night long she moveth seaward
With her crop of bloated dead,
Holding up their sores in pity
To the cold moon overhead.

Frozen sores with awful gaping;
Twisted faces carved with pain;
Wasted limbs and swollen bellies:
Here are Russia's sleeping swain.
Can we on the day of Judgment
Cleanse our garments of this stain?

Miles and miles of moonlight glowing
On a far more ghostly hue;
Miles and miles of smoking snowbanks
With dead hands protruding through:
Dumb, dead hands that plead in silence
To the soul in me and you.

There's a land where sorrow's children
Never knew the foot of play --
I can hear them slowly, slowly,
In their ghostlike bodies pray
For the crumbs our burdened tables
In the feast-hour cast away.

Olga might have been your daughter:
O her wealth of golden hair!
When you think of children's laughter
Can you leave her dying there
Where the Volga waits to take her
On that last ride of despair.

Everywhere tall pines are moaning,
In that land of awful curse,
And they sway like plumes of blackness
On a never-moving hearse;
And the music of their grieving
Wanders wildly in my verse.

We can rub our hands as Pilates
But, from that far wailing shore,
God will bear the Volga's burden
Unto every Christian's door;
And the dead upon our thresholds
Will remain forevermore.

But the preachers go on praying
And the little peoples die;
And the children, frail as moonlight,
Vainly, with their thin lips cry,
Vainly plead their swollen faces
To a sullen winter sky.

And the Volga moves to seaward
With her crop of bloated dead,
Holding up their sores in pity
To a cold moon overhead;
For the nations have forgotten
What the Master, Jesus, said.





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