Butugychag Poem by Leo Yankevich

(Eastern Siberia)

From this hillside full of multiple graves
(marked by discs made from the lids of tin cans,
rusty now, stamped with the ID numbers
of Tsarist and reactionary slaves) ,
some with their inhabitants’ remains
exposed to heaven, as if halfway risen,

we look down at the commandant’s old house,
past the howls in the cramped punishment cells,
as the wind brushes bent and brambled bars,
behind which stand the spectres of those who,
before the Great Patriotic War,
sinned against the state in dreams and whispers,

and we behold the spacious balcony,
the broken panes of the enormous window,
and the sun-bleached, rain-worn wood of the stair,
built for the little man from the Ukraine
who liked to sing in Russian and in Yiddish,
because, we are told, he enjoyed the view there.