Exile in Gorky: In Memory of Elena Bonner

by Joan E. Bauer

Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008), and with Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy, co-edited the international collection, Only the Sea Keeps:Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts and Rupa & Co, 2005).

Exile in Gorky

They gather close, melded,
like titanium and iron,
in an upholstered chair.

Academician Sakharov, upright,
Elena Bonner, leaning hard
against him. Her face stained

with foreboding. His eyes steady.
Sakharov’s talent, she writes,
to finish things.

My talent, to make sure his manuscripts
are not lost in some prison cellar
in Lubyanka.

Hunger strikes, press conferences,
vigils. She stands in the snow,
her heart failing,

nitro in one hand,
documents in the other.
An old woman shakes a fist.

A crowd gathers to denounce her.
She demands a tin of coffee,
insists on her full ration,

even as they take her passport.
Planting matthiolas, gillyflowers, malva,
she waits—

Will he return?
Survive the hunger strike?
The force-feeding?

And when he returns,
unbroken, to the city
of impenetrable clouds,

they ask—
Is this our fate?
To die here, forgotten?