Word spreads like wildfire, of potatoes
shipped in from the provinces.
Quick! Run home! Your daughter’s sled!
You double as the sled dog.
Line up at the cellar mouth:
thirty steps into the pit,
where the cold bites deep
and people stumble, groping in the dark;
mouth bawdy quips to hone their wits
on hunger’s pointed teeth.
A stench of putrefaction:
thawed and decomposing like dead flesh
in the three-week interim since their despatch,
those poods and poods of spuds languished
on platforms beside railway tracks,
until they could be rubber-stamped
and dumped here, where they froze afresh.
Now what? You have to wade through slime,
but in the vice of utter cold you can
no longer feel your legs or feet.
Like climbing over mounds of jellyfish,
you later note. You squelch and slither,
stupefied by hunger, hands desensitised,
clutching at the clods of stinking spuds
as children reach for treats.
Going home, the runner of the blue sled
splits beneath its load,
which now seems heavier to bear than woe.
Slush underfoot, or ice, or snow;
derision from some Red recruits.
Somehow you get the cargo home.
That night your household eats
and eats until replete, the children’s
bellies bloated with potato mush.
*
This poem was suggested by an episode
recounted in Tsvetaeva’s memoir, Earthly Signs.
Her younger daughter, Irina, was soon to die
of hunger in a Bolshevik-run institution for children,
where Tsvetaeva had placed her in the hope that she’d
be adequately fed.
pood: a historical Russian unit of mass, equivalent to 16.38 kg.
