The second section of Geranium Lake is called “Black Kites.” The name comes from a poem written for National Poetry Month in 2018. This section holds poems that are a bit darker and starker, inspired by sculpture and painting, as well as some photographs, posters, and insignia used for documentary and sometimes propagandistic purposes. (You can see that poem, and a photo of the sculpture that inspired it HERE.)

Today’s poem was inspired by the dislocation that can come when some remnant from the distant past, even a past one did not oneself experience, evokes an intangible, unsettling, but powerful response. This kind of amorphous, multi-faceted summoning is part of what gives art its enduring value. The book of photographs (cover image above) that inspired the poem, full of the extreme contrasts found in Tsarist Russia, below can be found in the synopsis at Publisher’s Weekly.

The Eyes of the Dead: A Synesthesia
(inspired by Before the Revolution, St. Petersburg in Photographs)


I turn these pages rich with photographs:
women, men, children—like mournful giraffes;
long-suffering horses under heavy yokes;
carts and Romanov carriages, gilded spokes
and iron wheels; ramparts of bricks and stones
(some still standing); lofty hats; rigid bones
(beneath silk bodices—human and whale);
jumbles of crockery; one pint of ale.

I close the covers, lift the heavy tome.
Setting it on a shelf, I think the room
is quiet but then a faint perfume
of haunting eyes—pierced with the foreknown gloom
that this wide earth is temporary home—
knocks inside my brain, demands its own poem.

Leslie Schultz  

Wishing you a day of striking and informative contrasts along with startlingly new perceptions, LESLIE