this poem is dedicated to the memory of Samantha Smith, a brave young woman who was real and good and more people should fucking well know it
She could have said
Yuri Andropov,
you butcher of Kabul Budapest and Prague
you truth-gagged demagogue,
you mind-grinding
soul-swallowing gulager,
KGB comissar,
Yuri Andropov,
general secretary
of the USSR
and a bureaucrat czar,
Yuri Andropov
you totalitarian toadying
fear mongering
hungering
autocratic
apparatchik Rasputin
Yuri Andropov you motherfucker
you monster you -
but
she didn’t say that.
And she had already lived 10 of her allotted 13 years
but she didn’t know that.
But she did say
that she did know
that people,
her people were scared.
She said
Dear Mr. Andropov,
people here are scared
that there’s going to be a very
very
very
very
very
very big war.
Between my country
and your country.
But we don’t want a war.
Do you?
And some time later,
Mr. Andropov,
that butcher and commissar,
dictator, apparatchik,
from the steppe to the pole
from Kamchatka to the Berlin wall,
the czar
wrote back.
he said we don’t want a war
not a large one or small
on land or at sea,
in air or in space
not at all.
We are scared too.
I promise you.
But words are just words,
so please come.
If you’re willing and able
I invite you to visit the Soviet Union.
And she did visit the Soviet Union.
And this at a time
when Reagan and Andropov
at the drop of a hat
at the push of a button
the push of an envelope
could bury the world
under a cloud of its own dust
of its own escaping souls,
this at a time
when Sting sung
of Kruschev’s spade,
when Bob Dylan put pen to blade
made a gavel and proclaimed
that history would judge us all
Stanley Kubrick dropped a bomb
rode by a cowboy
Coppola brought us the appocalypse
even in the summer of ‘69
there were 99 red balloons
in the summer sky
there were as so many questions screamed
only to echo back
only one 10-year-old
thought to ask
Dear Mr. Andropov
we don’t want a war,
do you?
She went to the Soviet Union
and from the Soviet Union came back
the press laughed at her
as a tool!
she said the Russians were kind
they jeered her still
she said god wanted all people to live together in peace
she was ridiculed, but to nothing
she said they are like us. The Soviets are like us.
The Russian children
are like American children.
what more do you need to know?
I know not what she knew
about rockets and rifles
or treaties or traitors
or what she thought
as a plane crash
ended her thirteenth year of life.
I don’t know how many cried
or how many sighed in relief
the day the only child
asking the right question
had died.
But the smoke of the wreck
writes a question mark,
makes me wonder
Dear Samantha Smith,
how we will ever know peace
if nobody knows how to ask for it?
