Marie

Prisoner's RightYoke of years that we lived in a prison Grants no rights: we're entitled to naught. Not to pulpits. Nor lecterns. Nor glory. Nor power. Nor halos of saints. Nor in memoirs to mix with fatigue Our colorless ashen complaints, Nor that armies of youths should now run astride life By the path that we treaded for them. All will go as 'twill go. There's no point To pound out the wheel's rut in advance. An illumined interior suffering core: May, for everything, this be our one recompense. It's the loftiest gem of all earthly gemstones. And, to carry it home undefiled, Let, of our phantom rights, then, the very least be: Our secreted right to an equal revenge. There's a number. So endlessly long, Comprehensible just to Chinese and to Russians All those fallen, extinguished, without guilt or trace: In that number we're nil upon nil. . . . Our right is but one: To be rancorless sons Of our luckless and sad Russian land. Let our grievances burn, rot, decay deep inside To the outside we'll spring living shoots: only then, Looking up, will our Russia's fatigued countryside See the sun it awaited so long.- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn