A foolish moon in a foolish sky

← v15n2, Fall 2016

When I fell down

I was laughing that I was in Russia and

exactly the age Lenin had been

at Finland Station and lucky to fall

under the moon and rise without pain

and go on walking toward the little flat

where another “dinner” of beets and

dumplings would be steaming and tea

and Gone with the Wind would again be

playing in garish TV color and Clark Gable,

spitting image of my father at twenty-five,

speaking Russian and I have just been born

into a Cold War that will vanish one day

when he is old and I am no longer really young.

travel history memory place

Ron Smith

Ron Smith, 2014–2016 Poet Laureate of Virginia, is the author of three volumes of poetry from Louisiana State University Press: The Humility of the Brutes (forthcoming), Its Ghostly Workshop (2013), and Moon Road (2007). His collection Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery was published by University of Central Florida Press in 1988. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Nation , The Kenyon Review , The Southern Review , and The Georgia Review ; and in a number of anthologies published in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Italy. In 2005, Smith was an inaugural winner of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and in 2006 he became one of the curators for that prize. Since 2010, he has been the poetry editor for Aethlon : The Journal of Sports Literature . He is the Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia, where he holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching. Photo by Delores Smith