Poem by Carolyn Howard Johnson

St. Petersburg Sestina

Upon My Visit to  PeskaryovskoyeKladbishe in 2002,
Sixty Years After Tanya Savachev Wrote Her Brief Eulogies
 

                        Only shards of a diary were left
                        behind by Russia’s Ann Frank.  Dyed
                        yellow, faded by the time
                        of this city’s sorrow since 1942,
                        the pages were torn from a notebook.  Only
                        inscriptions from her heavy hand cry
                        out to visitors who, in their turn, try not to cry
                        so they can see the messages she left.
                        By ’41 Zhenya has gone.  Not only
                        Zhenya but Babushka and Erena died
                        in that winter’s siege, 1941,
                        Leningrad’s longest, bitterest time
                        when the road of life was not long enough.  Time
                        was counted by deaths.  Tanya cried
                        only with her pen.  Count them.   Three dead by March of ’42.
                        Each death deserved a page.  Uncle Vasya left.
                        One page more.  Her mamma died.
                        “May 13th.  1942.  7:30 a.m.”  Only
                        then did Tanya’s large letters falter.  A little bit only.
                        Behind the blockade May promised a time
                        when life might get easier.  Winter had died.
                        When survival is heavy, a child has no time to cry.
                        A siege knows no seasons.  Tanya took only what was left.
                        What was left in the spring of 1942
                        was bodies.  Tanya’s 1942—
                        May 10th exactly—she wrote “Uncle Losha.”  Only
                        his name, his date, his time are left
                        on frail paper, remnants left by a child of her time.
                        On the next page her words cry
                        “The Savachevs have all died,”
                        no date or time--no need--for all have died,
                        absent evidence of the despair of ‘42
                        when Tanya’s words are all that cry
                        out, her memoir on mortal scraps.  Only
                        “The Savachev’s have all died, ” Her need of time
                        had past.  The last schoolgirl entry says “Only Tanya is left.”
                        This Kladbishe journal, cryptic text left to curl and die
                        after Tanya’s time, the mourning of 1942,
                        leaves only the city’s seagulls to cry.  Aloud.