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Two Russian poets have been handed long jail sentences for taking part in a reading of anti-war poems in Moscow. A Moscow court gave Artyom Kamardin seven years and Yegor Shtovba five and a half years for "inciting hatred" against Russian troops and making "appeals against state security". Both had pleaded not guilty… A third poet who had taken part in the poetry reading, Nikolai Dayneko, was given a four-year sentence earlier this year after pleading guilty and co-operating with the investigation. —BBC, December 28, 2023. Photo: Russian poets Artyom Kamardin (L) and Yegor Shtovba (R) stand inside the defendants' glass cage as the verdict against them is announced at a court in Moscow, on December 28, 2023 [Alexander Nemenov/ AFP via AlJazeera] |
Artyom Kamardin, the scuttling hands
of Putin’s comrade army clutched you away.
Yegor Shtovba, they broke you in prison, brutally
shoved their weakness inside you.
Today they sought to silence freedom,
and tonight Akhmatova’s ghost screams.
All for the crime of poetry. A few words
that sat heavily in public, burning
like Chernobyl rubble, glowing in the dark.
What will their half-life be?
Already the rallied crowd shuffles
back into quiet anonymity.
Who bows their head lower now
in shame, them or Pushkin?
Where are the souls so moved
reciting Eugene Onegin from memory?
Where the fierce courageous applause
that followed Shostakovich and Yevtushenko?
Freedom is still a young and starving child,
will you like Tsvetaeva give her to the state to die?
Why grieve for fallen soldiers
when you murder them at home?
Perhaps their poems were as meaningless
as Soviet ration cards for milk past 10 am,
or victory claimed in a burned-out village.
One poem may not change the world.
But words are radioactive and once heard
can decay the most calcified mind’s
defenses. Perhaps the sense of resistance
is not to succeed, but inspire others to resist.
A poem may change the world for one person.
M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. As an historian and poet, he is interested in what—and how—societies choose to remember and forget traumatic episodes from the past. He has poems forthcoming from Topical Poetry and The Main Street Rag.