SUDDENLY SOVIET

suddenly one morning
woke up transformed
no old
nostalgia for
Cold War days
but fully newborn
Soviet

ready to
assume my place
as Commissar, apparatchik, or
on the sly, samizdat
publishing
poetic
dissident

that the West
would fete, and defend
and love

until
Glasnost days and
the walls all fell

at which
(so quick
to change their mighty tune)
suddenly

they
didn’t

Published by Damian Garside