Bella Akhmadulina

The Russian poet Bella Akh­madulina has died. I saw her read once, in the old Project Theatre in Dublin, and was so moved by the way she read her poems in Russian, which reminded me of chanting in a cathedral, that I wrote the following piece, published in my collection The Year of the Knife.
Thank you, Bella. May you rest in peace.

THE RED CATHEDRAL
   –on see­ing Bella Akh­madulina per­form her work

‘The Cathed­ral is aligned East to West,
a circle on two rect­angles
over a blind spring where pil­grims sup.
Its red­stone wings spread North and South.
It greets the rising sun,
and accepts dark­ness as it comes.
Requir­ing noth­ing, it is noth­ing to itself.
To enter into it
is to be given a hard grain as talis­man.
Solitude touches its high, bare walls.
Grass has split the flag­stones;
dust swarms in light from the stained glass.
The Cathed­ral is home to ter­rains and cit­ies
and those who live in them
as they breathe fumes, travel on shunted trains;
and just now, a woman dressed in black and gold
is the swooned instru­ment
through whom the Cathed­ral fills with their song.
High in the dome, a swal­low loops and skims
to the soar and whis­per
of grief, to the little shuffle of the woman’s fun.

  – Philip Casey



The Red Cathedral by Philip Casey is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.