[Eventhough this is a poem from an Ukranianian 'patriot' set in the first part of the 1800's,it conveys the horror and sorrow of today, the Serbians & Albanians and Africa and many others that makes Homo Sapiens less human than many creatures, we say, are beneath us.]
THE GREAT GRAVE
Taras Shevchenko
Second Soul
This, my sisters, is the reason
Why they buried me also,
For I watered well the horse
Of the Moscow ruler.
There in Baturin, when he
Went back from Poltava.
I was but a little maiden,
When at night the Moskals
Set in flames great Baturin
And they murdered Chechel
And they drowned the young and adults
In the river Seyma.
I fell down among the corpses
In the very chambers
Of Mazepa. And around me my
Mother and my sister,
Murdered in each other's arms,
Lay there dead beside me.
Then by force and violence
From my stricken mother
They removed me once for all.
And I kept on begging
To a Moscow captain that he
Would kill me at once.
But they did not. No, they sent me
As a toy for Moskals.
But I escaped and found a refuge
'Mid the raging fire
There was but one house left standing
In all Baturin.
In that house they had determined
That the tsar would stay
On his way back from Poltava.
And I went with water
To the house . . .
And then he beckoned with his hand to me.
And he bade me to tend his horse.
So I gave it water.
I had no idea I'd wrought
Such a grievous sin.
I had scarcely reached the building
When I fell down dead.
The next day, when he departed,
I was safely buried
By grandmother, who was staying
'Mid the growing fire.
For she laid me out with kindness
In a roofless building.
On the next day she died too
And decayed right there,
For in Baturin there was no one
Who could bury the victims
=======================
In 1847 Shevchenko was arrested and charged with belonging to an illegal society and with writing insolent, revolutionary poetry. He was sentenced to serve as a private soldier in the Orenburg district. The tsar, in his own handwriting, demanded that the poet be placed "under the strictest supervision with a prohibition of writing and sketching." For the next ten years Shevchenko lived the life of an exile under the military discipline of the Empire he hated so much. However, he managed to write secretly and even to paint. The poems from that period show a more detached and philosophic attitude to life; his hostility to the regime was unchanged. After his release in 1857, Shevchenko was in poor health and he died, unmarried, in St. Petersburg on March 10, 1861 at the grand old age of 47. |
