Russia Wins the Finley Experience "International Views Contest" (Poem One)

To: Russia (With the Poet’s Sincerest Apology)

What bravado and arrogance--
this writer, this pen--?
How little known so large a land,
so far away? And, I wonder
if those far off inhabitants
would forgive me my ignorance?

I bet a number I might try my hand
at a foreign view of a noble land,
where long held customs stand
frozen listening to some blues band
as their singer sings throaty tunes
and the sultry folks swing their sway
attuned to the need to move to continue
on in that jocund hips sway kind of way.

Or, so all the American movies portray.

I rack my brain
for everything, anything
I can recall about Russia,
the USSR, the Soviet Union,
and all I know for sure:

these veritable names are variables
of a geographical mass subject
to reorganization and redistribution
at a pace that frightens at least one
similarly stationed nation.

An unimaginable testament,
lives lost to the competitive races:
Stalin’s five-year plans versus
McCarthy and his anti-Communist
choke-hold on my nation, either way,
friend turned enemy turned friend again.

Watch, now, as yours sells mine seats
onboard ships sailing into inner space,
for a per seat price set in no less than
eight digits before the decimal place.

Earth bound issues seemingly floated away
in the haze of one last frontier just barely
big enough to hold the hopes of all of us
and waiting to be tamed by our combined
strengths and diversities as we leave
behind the local for the global, perhaps
one day down the road we’ll develop

the universal.

~Monique Finley
7-11-2011
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