Today’s snippet is from The Moscow Affair (published in November). In the novel the character Dunyasha is a Russian baroness, who has lived in America since a child to escape the Bolshevik Revolution. Now she is back in Russia trying to overthrow the Communists in the wake of Stalin’s death. Even though married to the Baron Bobrinsky, she and the Baron have a very open marriage and in fact don’t see much of each other. Dunyasha has fallen in love with Dru, but Dru doesn’t feel the same for Dunyasha. At this point in the novel, a young Czarist fighter, whom Dunyasha cares deeply about, died in a battle. He was a poet and the poem below is his last, which he had written for her but didn’t get the chance to give her:
Amongst the trees of this muddy spring
I sit foxhole deep and zeal fades away.
Again the rain so gently falls today
And to this gun, a babe to the breast, I cling.
We wait, listening for the word he brings
Which tells if we shall go or we shall stay.
And yet, it matters not. We just obey,
Day in, Day out, the orders of our King.
Foxhole deep in mud I sit thinking thoughts
Of her and all the choices wrong I made
Which put me here and left her, longing, there.
The things we do for love of king, I swear
We should think over again the things we were taught
And give our love to no one but a maid.
Tears were in my eyes by the time she finished the poem.
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Hey CW, as I mentioned elsewhere, I’m not into poems at all (as in, I don’t understand them, they don’t understand me…) but your seems nice to me. Sweet and kind of melancholy 🙂
You got it, JazzFeathers. That is exactly what I was going for. Sweet and melancholy. Really pleased it comes across. In the novel, this is a turning point for Dunyasha. The young partisan she was fond of and romantically interested in is killed. She is given the poem, his last, and she has a major re-think about the civil war heretofore she has been helping to foment.