Platonova

A poem dedicated to Daria Dugina

Alexander Ross dedicates his latest poem to the memory of Daria Dugina.

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It was not your words they wanted burned, but your father’s.
So claimed the radio the day of your murder. But I knew better.
Just short of sixty years between the two of us, running
reconnaissance under the ignoble reign of quantity. How was I not
to recognize another? Perhaps our swords were meant, one day,
to clash on the fields of Mind. Perhaps that’s still in store. Maybe,
in the end, our enemies were all that we had in common, but that,
alone, was enough to make me mourn. And suppose we do meet,
even then, will I really be said to have known you? Marooned
as I am at the edge of occupation, epistemic castaway
from the island of the world. Odds are greater we’ll intersect
like pilgrims passing through some Ozymandian waste, nodding
once to one another, to the cracking statuary, as if we’d seen
the same. But the Latin eye looks up, I’m told. The Eastern eye
looks in. While the Slav’s sight is dialed for the horizon. Last night,
the sky was a sable gray underscored by fire. The sun, a parting flash,
as if to say, It’s you, sir, who is sinking. But I lacked the tongue
to clarify. So I’ll take it from you, instead. Was it just a lonely road
outside of Moscow, or something else entirely, in the cross-hairs
of your vision, as you turned the key on this waning age, and went?

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Alexander Ross is an American poet. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming with, Antelope Hill, Corncrake Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, The Society of Classical Poets, Gopnik Press, Michigan City Review of Books, Don’t Submit, HAWKEYE, Horror Sleaze Trash, and Ape House. He can be found on both Substack and X @YeomanPoet.