Three

-from an anecdote by Alexander Yakoulov who writes of one of Stalin’s trains full of former soldiers from the western front on their way to Siberia stopping briefly at a crossing and leaving behind a litter of scraps of paper full of names, addresses, and phone numbers in the hope someone would pick them up and contact their loved ones to let them know they were still alive.

I was there when the train stopped,
vents open in the cardinal corners like scars,
the day solid blue, so pretty it hurt.
I could not know what was soldered behind
sealed doors and steel curtained windows,
but I could see the litter of paper like rain
rain through the vents. When the train left,
I picked up as many as I could
pretending to be the one in charge of cleaning platforms.

Money was hard to come by, and food,
the war just ending. When you bend to work,
it is easy to deceive. Yet there were things
you knew needed doing. I had one pair of shoes
and I was hungry, yet I gathered the scraps of paper,
bided my time, and knew I could do
the right thing. Years later I still find
a phone number in a crevice, an address
in a pocket, a name stuck to the inside of a box.

Michael H. Brownstein