In Saint Alexander Nevsky Lavra
Snow muffled St. Petersburg late that day
and inside the church the city sang to us
as old men whispered to icons, babushki wove
sorrow over a body. Prayers drifted up the walls
into the sacred air, a symphony of words
for the spring’s bounty, for Marina’s baby,
for a toy from Grandfather Frost. A blizzard,
a swelling of human voices, and outside
in Tikhvin Cemetery, a woman sweeping the walk
beckoned us, legato gesture like a conductor,
and we followed her to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,
flowers strewn about his tomb, his muzikanty –
Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov –
all buried nearby. That dusk, their voices rose
over the city, the day’s final movement, with snow
falling like the curtain at performance end.
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Abner Oakes taught middle and high school English for 16 years and has had poems published in the Potomac Review, the Maryland Poetry Review, the Baltimore Review, and Thimble Literary Magazine. He lives in Bethesda, MD.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 