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Lt. Col.
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova
first woman to orbit the earth, June 16-June
19, 1963
It looked like an apple
or a Christmas orange:
I wanted to eat it.
I could taste the juice
trickling down my throat,
my tongue smarted,
my teeth were chilled.
How sweet those mountains seemed,
how cool and tangy, the Daugava!
What scrawl of history
had sent me so far from home? . . .
When I was a girl in school, comrades,
seemingly lazy as a lizard
sprawled on a rock in Tashkent,
I dreamed of conquest.
My hands tugged at my arms,
I caught flies on my tongue.
Now my soul's as hushed as the Steppes on a winter night;
snow drifts in my brain, something
shifts, sinks, subsides inside,
and some undying pulse hoists my body
like a flag, and sends me up,
like Nureyev.
From my samovar I fill my cup with air,
and it overflows.
Who knows who scatters the bright cloud?
Two days and almost twenty three hours
I looked at light,
scanning its lines like a book.
My conclusions:
At last I saw the way
time turns,
like a key in a Lock,
and night becomes day,
and sun burns away the primeval mist,
and day is, and is not.
Listen, earthmen,
comrades of the soil,
I saw the Black Sea shrink to a drop
of dew and disappear;
I could blot out Mother Russia with my thumb in thin air;
the whole world was nearly not there.
It looked like an apple
or a Christmas orange:
I wanted to eat it.
I thought, It is pleasant to the eyes,
good for food,
and eating it would make men and women wise.
I could taste the juice
trickling down my throat,
my tongue smarted,
my teeth were chilled.
How sweet those mountains seemed,
how cool and tangy, the Daugava!
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My Marriage
(Genus: Lepidodendron)
It goes under like a spongy log,
soaking up silica.
I love these stony roots
planted in time, these stigmaria,
this scaly graduate
of the school of hard knocks,
these leaf scarred rocks
like little diamonds.
And the rings! . . . the rings
and cells that show forth
clearly, fixed and candid
as the star in the north.
Giant dragonflies, corals,
the tiny bug eyed trilobite
grace this paleosite
with shell and wing, cool,
amberstruck exoskeleton,
nice flash of improbability
felled and stuck, past
petrified in present, free
from possibility's hard and arbitrary
demands. Once, seed ferns swooned,
languid as the currents in a lost lagoon,
while warm winds swarmed over the damp earth
like locusts, and rain was manna.
I hold that time still.
Divorce keeps it real and intact,
like a fossil.
She Goes to War
Her face is her enemy.
She does battle in the mirror.
Look! This scar dates from Heidelberg,
that one from Saturday night.
There was a Polish boy, son of the ambassador
to Brazil, who carried a sword on the train.
All day long rain broke against the glass
and ran under the track, pooling between ties.
Back home, she lies in bed, scant sun shining
through eucalyptus leaves. Look here,
the deadliest confrontation is the one fought under cover
of camouflage, foliage
stenciled over the breast,
twigs and berries sprouting among the tangled strands
of hair she can do nothing with.
There is a man with a gun and he empties it into her chest.
©K.Cherry
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