NVN Thursday: Navalny Recalled in 2 Poems
“A Voice for Navalny” by Charise M. Hoge; “A Vast Shroud” by Trina Gaynon
A VOICE FOR NAVALNY
by Charise M. Hoge
Irina Ratushinskaya in 1986. Photo by Jane Bown/The Observer.
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What would Irina say, Irina Ratushinskaya, poet in a prison camp in 1983? She saved her art with a matchstick and soap–– carving stanzas, committing to memory, washing away evidence. Would she capture the omissions, the dying brilliance, as she did the pattern of frost from the gulag? Would she take the matchstick of our outrage? Would she put soap in the mouth of untruth?
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Charise M. Hoge is a dance/movement therapist, writer, and performing artist. She is the author of Striking Light from Ashes and Muse in a Suitcase. Her poetry is also featured in Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers (edited by David Lehman, Cornell University Press), as well as various journals. Charise is poet-in-residence for Art on Cullers Run (Mathias, West Virginia) and Art All Night H Street (Washington, DC).
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A VAST SHROUD
by Trina Gaynon
The late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, seen here smiling during a 2021 court appearance, never lost his sense of optimism and joie de vivre behind bars, says Ilia Krasilshchik, a Russian journalist who exchanged letters with him in prison. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images via CBC).
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If they’re told to feed you caviar tomorrow, they’ll feed you caviar. If they’re told to strangle you in your cell, they’ll strangle you. Aleksei A. Navalny Excerpt from letter to Ilia Krasilshchik
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Exile begins when the law is broken. Don’t let them tell you your arrest will be followed by a bail hearing. There will only be bank accounts seized and a shuffling between prisons, There will only be a pen and paper, sometimes held up to prison windows by your attorneys, sometimes transmitted through an outdated digital system. Don’t let them tell you there will be a trial, an impartial jury, an unbiased judge. There will only be executioners slipping poison into your tea, shoving a knife into vital organs as you walk the streets, or releasing a little nerve gas in your cell. Don’t let them tell you death will erase you, every sacrifice in vain. Call out the lie.
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Trina Gaynon's poems recently appeared in Poetry East, Tomahawk Creek Review, and Clepsydra. More can be found in The Power of the Feminine I, Volume 1, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, other anthologies, numerous journals, and a chapbook An Alphabet of Romance from Finishing Line. She received an MFA in Creative Writing at University of San Francisco. A past volunteer for literacy programs in local libraries and WriteGirl in Los Angeles, she currently leads a group of poetry readers at the Senior Studies Institute in Portland.