Peasants Around Small Fires
along the Volga River, Russia just after Communism      

flames orange their eyes
                                                the life inside
                                                worn faces

  one, cooking slim fish,
manages a silenced name

            God

he says
with frightened pleasure

God                 and again 
   God

              like so, like that
            while waters came

the current    language of water    there
                                                  at their boats
                                 moored
                        to the trees
            by the banks of Yaroslavl

God                 with winds letting loose
                                   against evening

pushing
a slow mist upon everything

God     he continues
            God

until they stand, they all sing
            barely seen
                                    unsecreting

                        the new sound of their bodies.

[“Peasants Around Small Fires” first appeared in Sojourners (Marion, OH) January/February 2002. It also appears in the author’s book Without Home and is reprinted in the anthology Poetry of Recovery.]

Therése Halscheid