"Elegy for Vera Dmitrievna Penkovksy and Her Kin"

Elegy for Vera Dmitrievna Penkovsky and Her Kin

Grand days upon the square of the people
cast their suns at the feet of statues
while citizens mimed passage through the all-seen city.

Vera Dmitrievna walked without her face, resolute,
in the web of the unsaid and suffered.
She led her son

by the hand gently and
desperately to every place they were allowed to enter.
Her husband was not dead

but he was not to be admitted.
No former friends consoled her
for the sense they should not

in the city of eternal October.
Quartered by their silence,
she threaded the small, dignified line

of her life through her neighbors. 
She lowered her head, her cheekbones honed,
taught her son the same:
incline to take this ration of
permitted peace.
Ties were hanged
on a rack in her closet,
emptied suits like specters.
Her neighbors in tenement halls and homeland also inclined

their shame at this woman, unspeakable
in her halved bed, drawn and fading in the dawn,
never again to weep over her love unobserved.

(If you’re curious, here are hints of Vera the historical woman, courtesy of her husband, Oleg.)