“Allies”

Welcomed ‘warmly,’ twice in half a year,

The soul revealed as the mask is slipping clear;

Winter glistening upon the morning ground,

The swagger glimpsed in summer nowhere to be found.

Their money to Moscow, for scheming, can’t be paid,

Leaving the EUnuchs fretting the falling centigrade.

On the fields and city streets our People’s blood did flow,

While thirty times their love for us they sent unto our Foe.

Once, they were Men, who besides our Didos stood

And held the craven Bolsheviks as long as heroes could.

Soon they will bid us sign a paper, “for the Greater Good,”

As their green-mad Citizens scrounge for coal and wood;

They, who, in Eighty-Nine, cried that their land be whole,

Will order us to smiling cede what Putin’s Hordes have stole,

And they will not see the contradiction,

Demigods in their own self-written fiction.

Welfare, apartments, tons of thankless toil –

Proximity to glamour, on another master’s soil:

As an offer to one’s’ subjects, it’s really much the same

As Khrushchev and his Commissars, rebuilding, did proclaim.

Alas, there’s here a song, saying something of “Cossack Kin,”

As though the sale of dignity were a worse than mortal sin.

Yet, with will, one might forget one’s roots

And can come to love the taste of foreign boots.