Survival
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| (Sunrise on frosted window by my wife) |
Between 1 and 3 March 1983, she was tried in Kiev and convicted of “agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime” (Article 62). Ratushinskaya received the maximum sentence of seven years in a strict-regime labor camp, followed by five years of internal exile. After being imprisoned three and a half years, including one year in solitary confinement in an unheated cell while temperatures fell to minus 40C in the winter, she was released on 9 October 1986, on the eve of the summit in Reykjavík, Iceland between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
While imprisoned Ratushinskaya continued to write poetry. Her previous works usually centered on love, Christian theology, and artistic creation, not on politics or policies as her accusers stated. Her new works that were written in prison, which were written with a matchstick on soap until memorized and then washed away, number some 250. They expressed an appreciation for human rights; liberty, freedom, and the beauty of life. Her memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, chronicles her prison experience. Her later poems recount her struggles to endure the hardships and horrors of prison life. (from Wikipedia)
No, I’m Not Afraid
No, I’m not afraid: after a year
Of breathing these prison nights
I will survive into the sadness
To name which is escape.
The cockerel will weep freedom for me
And here – knee-deep in mire –
My gardens shed their water
And the northern air blows in draughts.
And how am I to carry to an alien planet
What are almost tears, as though towards home . . .
It isn’t true, I am afraid, my darling!
But make it look as though you haven’t noticed.
~Irina Ratushinskaya (translated by David McDuff)
I Will Live and Survive
And I will tell of the first beauty
I saw in captivity.
A frost-covered window! No spy-holes, nor walls,
Nor cell-bars, nor the long endured pain –
Only a blue radiance on a tiny pane of glass,
A cast pattern – none more beautiful could be dreamt!
The more clearly you looked the more powerfully blossomed
Those brigand forests, campfires and birds!
And how many times there was bitter cold weather
And how many windows sparkled after that one –
But never was it repeated
That upheaval of rainbow ice!
~Irina Ratushinskaya
Believe Me
Believe me, it was often thus:
In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything—from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed—
Without your valiant hearts
To light our path.
~Irina Ratushinskaya
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