Aidan Semmens
THE VANISHING OF WORKERS' SETTLEMENT #3
down a winding path
in a shadowy scene
a woman and a man are pushing
a wagon loaded with industrial implements
you must guess at their concerns
which if any of the huddled huts
in the barely focused background
may be their homestead
or their place of work
whether the dog standing alone
in what might pass for a village street
is theirs or maybe a wolf
heavy with traditional symbolism
strayed from the vestigial forest
that crowds at the edges
vignetting the pastoral view
down winding paths the people
and the powerful fragment
a strategic actor looks for ways
to achieve goals of hegemony
the magnetic energy of acts of exchange
in the field of ideas and perception
under powerlines the elements of coercion
in that perpetual plebiscite of desires
the leaking of confidential documents
is carefully aimed ferocious and destructive
with few and precise preliminaries
disunity is easy to achieve
in ankle-deep snow through which
you might glimpse rails
a huddle of the elderly pushes a cart
that brings the weekly delivery
the village itself is barely more
than a row of wooden sheds
or barracks interspersed sparsely
with small garden plots
things have been falling apart
since the onset of modernity
fragmentation is the condition of knowledge
the extortion of desire extraction of obedience
from Petersburg to Trieste a different
model of the family pertains
clusters of matryoshki
in posters on the metro
many of the buildings
have collapsed into themselves
or been taken over by goats
and stray dogs treading eerie pathways
even against reprehensible authority
protest may shade into malice
revolt into viciousness levels of fertility
began to decline even before the revolution
Copyright Aidan Semmens 2013
