100 Themes Poem: “Death-Dance in the Coffeehouse”

Well, now autumn has come to Novosibirsk … which means it’s time for poetry again.

For whatever reasons, I can’t bring myself to write poetry in the summer. Prose, fine. But the moment I try to sketch out a poem, it usually putters out like an old car running on fumes.

Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the sun. In Siberia, there’s something loud, brash and oppressive about the summer sun, which makes it difficult to get into the quiet, contemplative spirit I prefer for writing poetry.

In any case, temperatures have now dropped, the leaves have started to turn on the poplars, and the cafés have rolled out new menus. It’s time.

I’m about to break my long poetic silence, which is quite appropriate, because the next item on my 100 Themes list is —

SILENCE

To be fair, I did draft this in the summer … so I didn’t entirely avoid poetry in July and August. But now we’re making it official.

Written in a coffeehouse, with noisy neighbors. Not sure how the skulls got in there.

---

Death-Dance in the Coffeehouse

Russians, they said, don’t believe in silence—
if it’s silent, something’s wrong. That must be why

I can’t write alone in a café corner
without an embassy settling, pigeon-like,

and clearing the silence before them. Something’s wrong
with a darkened café, a voiceless corner, a girl too full

of prayer and pu-erh. Let us purge her with chatter and cheer,
mementos of a forgetting world. Life is sound—life’s a shout!

Life is voice, and voices are life! Let us make it so
quickening-loud, we can’t hear ourselves dying.

Nor living, either.

In the notebook I hear us all living
as seeds of long memory stir. Life begins here

in silence, in the humming depths of earth.
The Russians used to know. We all knew, once—

until we learned to play the dans macabre
so withering-loud it deafened the soul, darkened the eye

and we couldn’t see whose skull we trampled.
But don’t pity the skulls—they live. I hear them

chattering my name. From the pounding earth
I’ll bless the sound of forgetting and burrow

beneath, to the lost, the silent remembering. Here
life begins again. Let the dance swing on above.

I turn the page.

---

And there she is, the first poem of autumn. Feel free to post your own poems in the comments below.

It’s September now — let’s get crackin’!