A Poem by Inna Dulchevsky

Two Poets

     for Marina Tsvetaeva and T.S. Eliot

Two different souls

Two separate lives

With their crafts
Have merged
into
       one
              creation
                                     a poem

Where two different hands
Were holding ashes

                                              --leftovers--

Burned ruins
                   of their lives
As a prize
              for a try

One poet
      was nailed to a cross

The other
      was pinned to the wall;

                                             Does it matter the choice
                                             How the soul gets exposed
                                             For the moment of judgment?

Pain from metal in flesh
                        was too acute

With acid in the mind
                too strong
           to bare
for both

They used their voices
To confess their pain
And darken the paper
With voices of pain

As if
       they were trying
To save their souls
From the possession
of unknown gods

They were begging to heal

Eaten sores
                  at the edges of craters

Again and again
            Through the echoing pain
                     
                                                Hollow of hearts
                                                Hollow of lives
                                                Hollow of loves

                                                Hollow

Inna Dulchevsky is a student at CUNY Kingsborough in Brooklyn, New York.  She was awarded the First Prize 2014 David B. Silver Poetry Competition.  Her work has appeared in Antheon 2014 publication; and in the second book of John Casquarelli, Lavender, in a collaborative poem, My Nirvana.  Her early school years were spent in Belarus.  Inna's literary influences include PUshkin, Lermontov, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Block, Bunin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Nabokov, and Dostoevsky.  Her interests include metaphysics, philosophy, litarature, practice in meditation and yoga.  Inna's musical education in violin and classical singing, as well as her discovery of Vermeer's light and expansion of consciousness through the connection with inner self and Nature are essential in the writing of her poetry.