I'm going now, to another part of the world.
Some people accuse me of having political balance when I read
this, but no balance intended.
It's simply that.
My father's family is from Czechoslovakia.
And so the 1968 invasion of Prague
was a subject of concern.
And a lot of my relatives still live in Tarna, Czechoslovakia.
And this is a poem about, you remember in 1968
the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.
And the students got out on the street
throwing bricks and rocks, and Molotovs and all
of that at the tanks.
Sort of like other situation here in that year,
but it was a little bit more serious for them at the time,
because the Soviets occupied their city.
And the Soviet soldiers found themselves
in a position of having to be an occupation force, when
they were 18, 19, 20 years old.
And so they were very far from home.
So like all occupation armies, what they wanted to do
was to drink in Prague bars and date Czech girls.
You can imagine how this went over with Czech boys
in particular, but nobody really liked them.
And however, there is a drink in Eastern Europe called Slovicka.
Slovicka is 190-proof alcohol, and it has been
breathed upon by dead plums.
So it can be called plum Brandy, but it
has nothing to do with Brandy.
You can't even smell it without staggering out of the room.
But like pour one jigger of this stuff,
and the tradition is you're sitting in a circle.
You pour one big jigger.
A Czech jigger is bigger than ours, and you bottoms up this--
somebody makes a toast, and everybody
has to all the way down.
And the next person gets to make their toast,
and then another person has to make their toast
and so on and so on.
And you have to do one of these for each of these,
so pretty soon everybody's under the table after the toasts.
Well, that's how the Soviet soldiers wound up
being able to go in the Czech bars.
Nobody could even see a uniform after an hour of this,
and so everybody's slapping themselves on the back
and making toasts.
And this is a story of a young man who made the wrong toast.
You remember Dubcek, right?
OK, the man was taken from power by the Soviets.
Svoboda is a word meaning liberty.
It is also the name of another official taken from power.
Anyway, this is it.
It's called Letter from Prague, 1968 to 1978.
It is winter again.
Those cold globes of breath that shape themselves into bodies.
I am still in prison having bowls of paste for breakfast.
I wake to the bath of lights in the yard, the violent shadow
of a man running as I should have run.
As I should have climbed, leaving the moons of my fingers
where no one would find them.
It is 10 years, and hard to believe even now that in 1968,
I should have been so stupid.
Touching my glass to a soldier saying, viva Dubcek.
viva Svoboda, viva socializme.
At 28, I am old.
Recalling bottles we filled with gasoline,
corked with rags from our mothers dresses.
And that slow word, Soviets spoken on a stream of spit I
could have fallen in love.
There were plenty of women in the streets calling
roses, roses.
I should have given the money.
Taken their petals to a room where
I might have dropped to a bed.
My eyes turned open at morning to touch myself,
now there is nothing.