Park Kultury

I've been meaning to write something about the terrible bombings in the Moscow Metro back in March, and have been carrying fragments of a phrase or two around with me for a while -- if the image isn't too repellent, sometimes an inspiration feels like putting together something that arrives in bits and pieces, the imagination as the opposite of a bomb. Anyway, thinking about that tragedy and its origins in another tragedy, this is the stanza that eventually came:

Kultury is twelve marble roundels
displayed along a Metro wall.
Kultury is nails bagged in bundles
explosive pressed into a ball.
Kultury’s skaters, tennis players;
Kultury’s martyrs, random slayers.
Kultury is a model plane,
a future freed from debt and shame.
Kultury is a mushroom hunter
slaughtered in the forest snow:
it's what we can't and so must know.
It is our brief reply to winter:
a warm breath’s disc in a window’s frost;
ice-hole to rivers of the lost.