Farewell, Leon Lvovich

"Together with our boy has died everything
that still remained young within us."
– Leon Trotsky

What terrible suspicions come to us in the dark? Sedov
is no more, the Moscow executioners have struck again,
they have expunged Leon Lvovich without a shot being fired.

No more will he ride the Moscow streetcars of his youth.
No more will he clean the snow from the Moscow streets.
No more will he step out under the Parisian sky with his beloved
wife, Jeanne.

He has gone to join his brother, Sergei and his sisters, Zinaida
and Nina Lvovna in death, only now will he gain the peace
he was denied in life by the ghouls of the Thermidor.*

For three days, his mother and father mourn in the darkness
of their private room, and they are changed irrevocably.
Now only the vengeance of history can console the Old Man.

Not until Stalin has been consigned to that chamber of horrors
reserved for the Nero’s and Caligula’s will Trotsky
ever breathe easily again. His younger self is gone forever.

What dreams may still abound, lie in the victory of the Fourth
International. Our only weapon is the truth... The truth will emerge…
Sedov’s words are etched into our minds until the end of time.

[]

* Thermidor is that moment in the development of a revolution when the masses begin to withdraw from active intervention in history and the original leadership of the revolution is replaced by a conservative bureaucracy.

(first published on PoetryKit website)