Like an oscillating wave that gathers its roll
from the sea of Minsk, the crowd pushes its
weight away from itself, drops stragglers
into the outskirts of the pull, skins noses,
shatters iron lampposts, rim-cracked
cisterns of the new-paved boulevards
of Petrograd. The sailors of Kronstadt
bottle-burn the Tauride Palace
where gout-necked socialists swallow
Kerensky's bilgewater, Kronilov's
attempted coups and plots to surrender
Lenin. But farther down the street
where breadlines swell and cobblers
bury the bludgeons of the Black Hundreds
of Lvov, Trotsky sings to Lunacharsky,
to the gathered rubble of women who work
and save the city, this cold summer night
when the moon pulls away from clouds
and the sky wipes clean, and the tide
foams thick with sea-wrack, out of
which the thousands plot their coming.