print previewback RON SMITH
“A foolish moon in a foolish sky,”
my friend said to me, in English,
translating, she said, Pushkin.
It was a stage-set moon in a silver haze
over the apartment blocks. We turned
our backs on the crumbling flying saucer
of the metro station and walked into air
colder than any that had visited Savannah
since the Ice Age, into a little stand of woods
she called “a forest,” the white path
slicked by schoolboys.
When I fell down
I was laughing that I was in Russia and
exactly the age Lenin had been
at Finland Station and lucky to fall
under the moon and rise without pain
and go on walking toward the little flat
where another “dinner” of beets and
dumplings would be steaming and tea
and Gone with the Wind would again be
playing in garish TV color and Clark Gable,
spitting image of my father at twenty-five,
speaking Russian and I have just been born
into a Cold War that will vanish one day
when he is old and I am no longer really young. 
“A foolish moon in a foolish sky,”
Seven Deadly
Sins
St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, Petersburg