Navalny
As most of life is monetized and bought and sold
with little shame and less of reckoning
and the vacant conman who struts about the stage
is now become the marker of our age,
that rarest gift bestowed on men
continues to demand its awful price.
And so it is that Man has sent His Son
to die this time in the brutal Arctic north
for He would cleanse the putrefying carcass
that is Russia in our time,
as He once sent the children of the doomed White Rose
to atone the abomination
that was Nazi Germany,
as He sent Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner
deep into the stench of 1960s Mississippi
to reignite the beacons on a thousand waiting hills,
all human sacrifices paid time and time again
for purchase of an always shaky foothold
on the face of a trickster mountain.
Like a hunted animal who lost a bet
that evolution made perhaps too hastily,
freedom dies a little every day
along with truth, compassion, and respect.
Get Gary Simons’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Or so it seems on this once emboldened shore
where men dreamed and took their dreams in hand
and fashioned a republic and a means to govern it
imbued with fine defenses (or so they thought)
against all would-be tyrants
and the lawlessness that tyranny requires.
Or so it seems today when men have sold their souls
and offered up their birthright to honor a new false god
to mollify the grievances they can’t just spend away.
Two infants born of mothers meet the moment with like cries
but one becomes Navalny while the other is a trump,
a poor, defective, jaundiced little creature,
discomfortingly large
and strangely unable to be suckled,
long decried by Russian peasant women
who tell of writhing demons that in the night
enter the throbbing womb to do the Devil’s work.
It takes all of literature and psychology as well
to explain how such dichotomies can be,
but truth be told, not even Shakespeare can.
Yet even on the cross, Navalny smiled and joked
and looked directly in the eyes of history
as though he knew a more commanding truth
that all the lies of demagogues cannot undo.
There are shameful and heroic days in every age
when death alone can give full meaning to a life.
He was but a man, but what a man he was.
