When a beautiful communist
is in love with your husband,
what can you do besides bring
in her letters, cursive looping
and describing the snow piling in
northern Russia, growing
everywhere as in revolution,
something inescapable and
warm underneath — her hypothesis
that a weapon collects more light
than a jewel.
Love is functional as much
as nourishing, the warm dinners
in the foothills of Shushenskoye,
the barrier of the building holding
in heat while you translate his texts,
the universe between languages
where simpatiya has nothing to do
with sympathy and everything
to do with attraction, as in,
his deep attraction to the woman.
There is no way for you to know
that an astronomer will discover
Asteroid 2071 floating alone, without
companion in the universe
and name her Nadezhda — cold rock
widowed and rolling towards earth.
Click here to read Caroline White on the origin of the poem.
Image: Russian by flowcomm, licensed under CC 2.0.
Caroline White:
This poem is part of a project that researches complicated women in history, especially those overshadowed by male counterparts. Nadezdha Krupskaya was, in the truest sense, an educator and a brilliant translator. I read letters and texts in her own writing to understand a sense of her voice to inform the diction of the piece, wanting very much not to superimpose myself, the writer, onto her, but rather to present her as a figure. Particularly, I wanted to present the side of her that is less explicit: the feelings she surely had while the Bolsheviks rose in power but her marriage dissipated. Knowing about her husband’s infidelity as she suffered from an incredibly painful disability, she sacrificed herself for what she saw as the greater good.
Caroline White is a graduate of UNC Greensboro’s MFA program, where she served as editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has won the Prime Number Magazine poetry contest, the Crosswinds Poetry Journal poetry contest, the Ellis Prize, and was a semi-finalist in the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She was a finalist for the John Updike Fellowship and the Poetry Foundation Visiting Teaching Award, and was nominated for the Best New Poets prize. Her work appears in Cherry Tree, Slipstream Magazine, Boulevard Magazine, New Ohio Review, and others.
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