Writes Tim Shea:

Did you hear Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem? As Osip Mandelstam said, “Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” In fact, Mandelstam’s anti-state, anti-establishment poetry got him put into a government gulag for “counter-revolutionary activities,” where he died an early death, cause, of course, unknown. A true inaugural poem then, one for the ages rather than for the moment & for the state:

The Stalin Epigram
by Osip Mandelstam
Translated by W. S. Merwin

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.