From Nuncle Music

Sergei Prokofiev is dead

hung in the air

like an impossibility.

Prokofiev, one of my deaf spots.

So, is the weather here always like this?

No one should dare to die

on the same day as Stalin,

but Sergei beat the Wolf to it

by fifty minutes.

I wasn't there to wave them off

into versts of Elysian field

where thin ghosts flock and jostle

to hear the Five-Year Plans,

the forevers and foralways,

of our club-footed orator Wolf.

No wreaths for Sergei,

the Wolf had snaffled the lot,

while soul upon soul choked to death

in the crush for peeks at the corpse.

I might risk now a musical portrait

of the Kremlin Mountaineer,

not my old thunder, sonic diarrhoea,

writhings and rollings, overwritten

to stifle terror and drawn out thought,

but instead I punch out one last time

D S C H.

Let the Wolf howl.

After him, mere mortals.

GARETH REEVES