Light Showers

Time and the Moldau: 1960-1990

Here in my piano dream of Prague
In a small California room, out of tune,
I read the Moldau's downhill rush upon a measured page.
My fingers tap again the railing of the Charles Bridge.

Smetana groans at my fumbling with the glory,
But a flood glitters and glides under the pedals.
His river rushed through me as I stood on the Charles,
And now that memory drowns the present.

Christ looks down eternal from his crucifix midstream;
Far and small the stone ghost of Stalin sighs on a hill,
And under and around us, all glittering and passing,
How our yearning surges to the sea.

*Friedrich Smetana (1824-1884) became deaf before he wrote his six-part symphonic poem My Fatherland (1874-1879). The Moldau, the most beloved part of The Fatherland, draws on folk melodies to describe the course of the Moldau River and the joys and longings of the Czech people. The Communists erected a giant white statue of Stalin on Prague's highest hill, and in 1960 it still dominated the city Smetana had loved. But the view from the Moldau also includes the Christ that crowns the Charles Bridge. Prague Spring came and died in 1968, but spring keeps coming on.