@ Gorky Park Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Figuring out stranded like a wrecked ship
With another sinking to the bottom in silver earth,
War and peace he wrote and we do not know what you?
Anna Karenina he wrote and what you, or a Chekov’s play.
The Seagull, I remember this to have read, some years ago.
But both stand in worn out shoes, upturned trousers,
Carrying walking sticks, like masts turned down;
Getting initiated I think, let the soul be known
And let the spirit of the poverty, un-possessed, and ignorant
Be not unlike the rich, noble and their desires are not ignominious.
“Cloak and Dagger” was a pseudo name or “Gorky”
Could sweetness like sugar be bitter, as Gorky means bitter?

The tempest of “The song of the stormy Petrel”
“Like a blue flame, flocks of clouds blaze up above the sea's abyss. The sea catches bolts of lightning drowning them beneath its waters. Just like serpents made of fire, they weave in the water, fading, the reflections of this lightning.
-Tempest! Soon will strike the tempest!
That is the courageous Petrel proudly soaring in the lightning over the sea's roar of fury; cries of victory the prophet:
-Let the tempest come strike harder! ”

We met in the Gorky Park
And the Gorky Park thriller movie of 1983.
There was a cold war,
There were sufferings
There was a bipolar world,
A Dr. Zhivago and Boris Pasternak
And many more.

The soothing motherly drinks of Caucasian
And Vodka;
A Siberian train.

There you sat with the peasants and tyrants.
Went to Capri.

And you lived in a mansion made in bourgeoisie years.
Of Kingship.

Then there was nothing
And the world had a view of the fairies of Caucasus
With snow fall.

We had been reading Pushkin
The Kazakh girl told me it was too expensive
In a hotel lobby.

About Solzhenitsyn
I have written before,

We have learned aesthetic pantheism from Leo Tolstoy
And the name of White Nights from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

We still think and imagine
That the air is like our own’s.


-‘The song of the Stormy Petrel’ is a poem by Maxim Gorky.
-Gorky Park is a 1983 film based on a novel by Martin Cruz Smith.