As
April is National Poetry Month, and the Vermont Humanities Council is launching
it’s Vermont Reads 2013-Poetry 180: A
Turning Back to Poetry, the Cavendish Historical Society is encouraging
readers to explore the poetry of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived in Cavendish
from 1976-1994. While this Russian dissident and Nobel Prize winner in
literature is known for his books, such as Gulag Archipeligo, he also wrote a
number of poems. Below is Freedom to Breathe
from his 1973 book, Stories and Prose
Poems.
A
shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky, occasionally
sprinkling a fine film of rain.
I
stand under an apple-tree in blossom and I breathe. Not only the
apple-tree but the grass round it glistens with moisture; words cannot describe
the sweet fragrance that prevades the air. Inhaling as deeply as I can, the
aroma invades my whole being; I breathe with my eyes open, I breathe with my
eyes closed – I cannot say which gives me the greater pleasure.
This,
I believe is the single most precious freedom that prison takes away from us:
the freedom to breathe freely, as I now can. No food on earth, no wine,
not even a woman’s kiss is sweeter to me than this air steeped in the fragrance
of flowers, of moisture and freshness.
No
matter that this is only a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-storey houses like
cages in a zoo. I cease to hear the motorcycles backfiring, the radios whining,
the burble of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh air to breathe under an
apple-tree after a shower, we may survive a little longer.
(From: Solzhenitsyn: Stories and Prose Poems: Penguin 1973).
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