Artillery howls from just outside the city
while jets circle overhead.
Buildings crumble under the bombardment.
Days and nights. Tanks move forward
in clouds of soot. A Russian spokesman declares,
“The situation is coming under control;
we will set up kitchens to feed the city.”
Chechen boys in native battle dress
place grenades under the Russian tanks.
Old men hide in piles of debris to
shoot at movement on the street.
Women curse. Demoralized and half-destroyed,
the remaining Russian tanks withdraw
to take up shelling from outside the city.
Like an old coat, my friends’ apartment is
comfortable and warm. In the main room,
on a bed folded into a couch, we drink and
laugh and argue and eat. Stepping out
on the snowy street, not far from Patriarch’s
Pond and the church where Pushkin wed,
we meet a babushka from the apartment below.
“Have you voted?” my friend asks. “No,”
she says, and adds defiantly, “And if
I would, I would vote for the communists.
They fed us!” We walk on to the voting place,
across the street from the blinking neon sign
of the Cherry Casino. We joke about
the candidate who tomorrow will
win, who has promised to restore
the armed might of the Russian empire.