(after Jerzy Kmiecik)
Another day on the slow trains south,
yellow sand to the sky’s distant edge
then the River of Mystery brought us
to Ak Metchet, the White Palace, called
after the comrades came through Kazakhstan
Kizil Orda, the Red Capital, its names
at the station painted one over the other.
Here nothing to eat therefore nothing to steal.
And so to Tashkent that means Stone City,
Samarkand biscuit yellow, still in my dreaming.
I was by then again without shoes, a hole
the wind poked. That was 1942, the spring,
years from home, prison wire, prison trains,
a few necessary words the heart remembers.