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Note
on Death’s Head
Someone
once called me a poet of death, as if that were so different from being
a poet of life. I know that
what we can imagine is a poor guide to the way things are; but the poet
who isn’t as cognisant of death as of life isn’t paying attention.
Death is where we came from.
I
imagine that, to most of us, losing a mother is like seeing a great
statue crumble. She brought
us into existence, whether we like it here or not.
I was able to mourn my mother, see her in her coffin, stand by as
her remains were buried. But what of those in my time who could not?
This is only tangentially about my own mother, and she might have
understood. It’s about
the mass exterminations of the 20th century.
About people not being able to ‘put their lips / to an
identified head’. Part of
being is with a known self, part is with identified others.
Gulag:
the department of the former Soviet secret police that ran a network of
prison labour camps (from Glavnoe upravlenie
ispravitelno-trudovykh lagerei, ‘Chief Administration for
Corrective Labour Camps’). Hence
any prison or labour camp in the former Soviet Union to which criminals
and opponents of the government were sent.
These camps, many in extremely harsh regions like Siberia, were
created mainly in the 1930s under Stalin to suppress political
opposition and to provide a much-needed labour force.
They had a history going back to soon after the Bolsheviks under
Lenin seized power in 1917. Many
of the 20 million who died from Soviet cruelties perished in these
camps.
Alan
Marshfield
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