It began and was over in a single day. <br />November 7,1917 brought down the Romanoffs <br />and Russian history of a thousand years. <br /> <br />It raised powers that many fled in disguise. Rachmaninoff left <br />with his family and no music but a few composition notebooks, <br />two orchestral scores, his opera Monna Vanna and opera music <br />of beloved Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Golden Cockerel. <br />A brief concert tour trip, he said to officials, and he took his wife <br />and two daughters by sled to Helsinki from where the Scandinavian <br />concert tour lasted a year, and then— New York and California. <br /> <br />So simply he tore away from the holy land of his inspiration— <br />the wheat fields in summer suffused with sunlight, the bells <br />on the troikas that still traced the snow, the music that was <br />in the air of the atmosphere. <br /> <br />We have the horses in America <br />but not the romance. <br />We have injustice in America <br />but not the tyranny. <br /> <br />Either way, before or after, <br />there was tyranny in Russia, and <br />romance that turned to tragedy. <br /> <br />I look out on the luscious landscape <br />of my life, my revolution still underway <br />after 60 years and not likely to end <br />until I slip or trip or pop out of time, jump the twig, <br />leap the rainbow, and wind up in a stranger place of refuge <br />than ever my mother stepped into, off the boat ~ <br /> <br />carrying nothing with her from underground Russia <br />to New Brunswick and then to New York and California, <br />to find her freedom and destiny <br />and the life she gave me. <br /> <br />And so you might say that I, too, am a result <br />of the Russian Revolution, <br />set free to live my life in all its peculiar romance <br />and shape my destiny <br />with all its prosaic and less peculiar poetry. <br /> <br /> <br />This poem is in the book Diamonds in a Stony Field <br />by Alla Renée Bozarth copyright 2011. All rights reserved.<br /><br />Alla Renee Bozarth<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-shortest-revolution-in-history/
