Poem Written in 1991 When the Soviet Union Was Disintegrating by Ursula K. Le Guin i The reason why I’m learning Spanish by reading Neruda one word at a time looking most of them up in the dictionary and the reason why I’m reading Dickinson one poem at a time and still not understanding or liking much, and the reason why I keep thinking about what might be a story and the reason why I’m sitting here writing this, is that I’m trying to make this thing. I am shy to name it. My father didn’t like words like “soul.” He shaved with Occam’s razor. Why make up stuff when there’s enough already? But I do fiction. I make up. There is never enough stuff. So I guess I can call it what I want to. Anyhow it isn’t made yet. I am trying one way and another all words — So it’s made out of words, is it? No. I think the best ones must be made out of brave and kind acts, and belong to people who look after things with all their heart, and include the ocean at twilight. That’s the highest quality of this thing I am making: kindness, courage, twilight, and the ocean. That kind is pure silk. Mine’s only rayon. Words won’t wash. It won’t wear long. But then I haven’t long to wear it. At my age I should have made it long ago, it should be me, clapping and singing at every tatter, like Willy said. But the “mortal dress,” man, that’s me. That’s not clothes. That is me tattered. That is me mortal. This thing I am making is my clothing soul. I’d like it to be immortal armor, sure, but I haven’t got the makings. I just have scraps of rayon. I know I’ll end up naked in the ground or on the wind. So, why learn Spanish? Because of the beauty of the words of poets, and if I don’t know Spanish I can’t read them. Because praise may be the thing I’m making. And when I’m unmade I’d like it to be what’s left, a wisp of cheap cloth, a color in the earth, a whisper on the wind. Una palabra, un aliento. ii So now I’ll turn right round and unburden an embittered mind that would rejoice to rejoice in the second Revolution in Russia but can’t, because it has got old and wise and mean and womanly and says: So. The men having spent seventy years in the name of something killing men, women, and children, torturing, running slave camps, telling lies and making profits, have now decided that that something wasn’t the right one, so they’ll do something else the same way. Seventy years for nothing. And the dream that came before the betrayal, the justice glimpsed before the murders, the truth that shone before the lies, all that is thrown away. It didn’t matter anyway because all that matters is who has the sayso. Once I sang freedom, freedom, sweet as a mockingbird. But I have learned Real Politics. No freedom for our children in the world of the sayso. Only the listening. The silence all around the sayso. The never stopping listening. So I will listen to women and our children and powerless men, my people. And I will honor only my people, the powerless. Born in California But a true Oregonian
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