MANDELSTAM'S REVELATION

Blue lights seen
from armed men
in brigades

two children
brought to the morgue
their faces are ours

in St.Petersburg
sailor comrades are dead
bodies of poems rise up

from the Black Sea
in a resurrection
of Christians and Jewish souls,

Dante in his paradise
on a road back from Purgatory
at the voice of Russia,

cry Osip out for
drowning souls
asking us

to return to verse
as waters crown
you with green laurels

from your baptism of fire
for a new generation
away from civil war quarrels.