Rimas Uzgiris

February 2, 2024

“Haymaking” by Rimas UzgirisPosted by

Rimas Uzgiris

HAYMAKING

Western Lithuania, 1993

The farmstead was tucked away like a child
in sheets of gently rolling Samogitian land:
tufts of deciduous trees, the occasional stand
of pine, long stretches of rape and rye rounded
by the odd dairy cow fertilizing the ground.
The man of the house watched TV, paralyzed.
Three women worked the fields. They took me 
to harvest hay. We rode a cart pulled by a hag.
I was given a two-pronged wooden fork—
my “trident” to rule the waves—and struggled
to correctly lift and tuck the golden threads
onto the wooden loom. 
                                         That morning,
I had milked my first cow, trying not 
to show fear at the feet of the abrupt heft 
of the mammal, my senses overwhelmed
by the scents of her muscle-rippled hide, 
by the dew-drenched grasses scumbled
with the wildflowers of exclamation
whose names I didn’t know, by the hot 
white manna squirting into a dented 
metal pail that pealed like a broken bell.
 
The girls—as stout as the storks patrolling
the fields, as focused, and as at home
(though they too would migrate: to college
over the horizon’s edge)—smiled at me 
as at an omen of the good life to come
while they worked the harvest into shape,
sculpting their load, invisibly adept.
I was the plump anthropological specimen,
not they, visiting from far away, from a life 
they only saw refracted through a screen.
My God, were they strong! I was to be
a drenched rag-doll pulled out of the sea
in the still cool morning by the time
we had loaded up, riding back on top
of the pile of hay, feeling like a Breughel
subject, completely out of place,
as if I had been sucked into the frame
straight from some cozy gallery couch.
 
The tufts of trees, they explained, were graves
of farmsteads from before the last war: 
neighbors dispossessed of their land 
and transported in cattle cars to make 
what they could of love and death
in a New World of Siberian wastes. 
The mother had taken the fresh milk 
each day to the communist collective
in the valley below. The land was theirs
now, but she had to sell what they made:
milk, salt-pork, eggs, and fowl. Her husband
making the best of it in his wheelchair.
 
Baling the hay from our creaky ship
into its hollow, sun-slatted harbor,
learning how to take that devil’s fork
up and up and up until the loft
was covered in rough strands of gold,
I had had enough of anthropology by then,
and retired to a sunny mound to read
Mačernis’s poems about these parts:
the young poet himself blown up in a cart
like the one I rode, fleeing the oncoming
Red tide, trying to find the mysterious ferry 
to the New World where my parents fled, 
finding Charon smiling instead,
though no one knows which side
lobbed the shell onto his family’s 
desperate ride. 
                           The three came in
after several more rounds of hay
had been safely stowed away: thunder-clouds
gathered behind them like the omens of history.
They thanked me for the “unexpected
help.” I wanted to slink away to the city
and never come back. They meant it.
(I would swear they were genuinely
full of gratitude, that not a single smile
was snide, or false, or slow. I had a wife 
already, so this was not for show.)
 
I walked down to their little pond
at night, undressed and took a swim.
Duckweed parted, mosquitos patrolled
the sky above. Stars poked like pinholes
through shadows of intermittent clouds.
It was calm, small and beautiful, and meant 
nothing on its own. The city called,
but I took the phone off its hook
and drifted. I drifted away. I drifted here.
 

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

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Rimas Uzgiris: “In the early summer of 1993, three years after Lithuania declared itself independent, thereby starting the disintegration of the USSR, I visited my then-girlfriend’s family in rural Samogitia (Žemaitija). I had never been to that region, had never heard their dialect spoken, had not ever worked on a farm, or even sat and talked with farmers. So it was quite the anthropological event for me, already feeling a bit lost and homesick after nine months in the country from which my parents once fled as refugees. I still remember that visit fondly, and finally, now living in the country again, I figured out a way to write about it. That way of life, the small, technologically simple farmstead, is dying out. So the elegy mixes here with a bit of comedy (directed at the author who felt himself quite out of place).”

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February 27, 2022

“My Country’s Wounds” by Rimas UzgirisPosted by

Rimas Uzgiris

MY COUNTRY’S WOUNDS

adapted and redacted from “Prison Chant” by Olena Herasymiuk, serving in a hospital battalion somewhere in Ukraine

He looks at me long.
A kind of longing.
He says

“The most important thing is love.”

He looks at me long.
Oh, his kind of longing.
He says

“The most important thing is
to love thine enemy.”

Who steals—
who even steals
your history
along with your land.

“So don’t shoot.”
He says,
“No.
Don’t shoot.”

He says,

“Just lay down your arms—
Slowly.
Just raise your white arms—
High.

Raise them up high
like a chalice, like a prayer,
and then you will know—

Yes—

As your blood sprinkles fire on the low ground,
you will know
the true taste of love.”

*

“And there will be no war.”
—Fire.

“And there will be no war.”

*

I open the window.
Fire flies in on the air.

I cross the square.
Fire fingers the stone.

I walk through the city
and hide like a mole in its holes.

And there it is, beside us—fire.
And here it is, inside us—fire.
I close my eyes and I can see—fire.

My faith, my honor—all fires.
My country’s memory—my bleeding wound.

Cauterize it—with fire.

And I will go on:

I walk through walls
I eat the air
I never stop

Never stop.
—Fire.

—from Poets Respond
February 27, 2022

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Rimas Uzgiris: “I wanted to write a poem responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I could only think of Olena Hersymiuk’s long poem ‘Prison Chant’ (orig. Ukrainian) that I saw her perform in the Druskininkai Poetic Fall Festival 2021. I reread the English translation and the Lithuanian translation. I decided to take some pieces of the poem, rewrite them, making them into a short lyric fitting the present horrific invasion. The result is much too far removed to be a translation, but I believe it has a piece of the heart of Olena’s poem in it, like a piece of hot shrapnel. I tried to show it to her, but she is at the front lines in a hospital battalion.”

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September 29, 2019

“Blank Verse for a Blank Earth” by Rimas UzgirisPosted by

Rimas Uzgiris

BLANK VERSE FOR A BLANK EARTH

What little is left of life in coming years
may be enough for us to thrive, but who
will take the chance of leaving dust for those
who follow after us? The earth will spin
in cold abyss: eternity, to limited eyes.
The blue of skies may dim, go brown, like shit,
and insects may find that they have won.
Still, some make fun of Greta T. who spoke
with raw autistic fire of dreams destroyed,
and some of those belong to my poetic world:
I cringe. I cry. I want to die. An implacable
sea of plastic floods our veins, yet children laugh
as children do, and cry, and do we want to be
the cause of why they die? I’m sick as well
of greed that sounds the bell of market death.
She’s right, the girl. And right not to play coy,
or nice. Who’ll pay? The young. Who’ll pay? The ones
who play with fate should, but so little power flows
through public hands. They need a girl to make
them understand, yet mock the thing they want
to most forget. I put my fate, Greta, in your hands.
Though I should do much more. I cry, I cry
out with you. I pray the light we pass from eye
to eye can still slice through this will to die.

—from Poets Respond
September 29, 2019

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Rimas Uzgiris: “This poem was written in response to Greta Thunberg’s UN speech, though even more, one might say, it was triggered by the mocking response to it (and her) by all too many people. In particular, there were some (too many) in the Lithuanian literary community who mocked her. I had originally planned to write a blank verse poem to submit to a metrical poetry contest, but my disgust at what was happening in the wake of her speech caused my thoughts to always circle back to this theme.” (web)

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December 30, 2018

“The Ancients and Us” by Rimas UzgirisPosted by

Rimas Uzgiris

THE ANCIENTS AND US

Thinking about post-truth today, Socrates
came to my mind, barefoot, of course,

not like a beggar, still eyed with the arrogance
barely cut by faux humility, by that ignorance

he made famous in his take-downs
of other men until they told him to split town

and he refused. What was he to do?
With no smartly Athens he was through.

Now with Trump in front we have our Gorgias,
just more dumb, with the demeanor of an ass.

Socratic dialogue can’t find the smallest ledge
to stand on, and speech itself has lost its edge

when everything said is like a thick, blunt club
to beat the heads of those who haven’t joined the club.

Some sibilant sibyllic virus has infected language use,
and nothing much we say these days still rhymes with muse.

Take my toddler recently who gazed at Christmas lights
and with ingenuous wonder declared, “Those lights are nice!”

He pronounced that final word now how I cannot:
no hyperbole, no irony, nothing of what is not.

Parmenides held that what is not is nothing at all,
and so our agéd tongues do skitter, slide over falls

to float dead in a pool with oil, plastic and refuse—
dead bodies decorated with lights, poisoned, no use

for us to help enunciate the unseen sight of what persists,
or touch the realm (corrupted kingdom!) of what really exists,

and as I couple these last lines, I wonder whether they have pith
or merely slide into the self-propelled simulacra of present myth.

—from Poets Respond
December 30, 2018

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Rimas Uzgiris: “My poem was written after reading an academic article about Socrates that got me thinking about our “post-truth” moment, Trump’s tweets and Ancient Greek rhetoricians, and then when Christmas made an appearance as well, I thought, yes, Rattle, yes.” (web)

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