- You grew up seeing the pictures—
- Fierce men in fur hats, standing on Lenin's tomb,
- the Kremlin's fortress wall behind them
- and before them, marching troops and missiles
- poised to kill you.
- Now stand here, a guest of the new regime,
- both feet dead center of Red Square, August 2000.
- In front of you, Lenin's tomb, with no one on its roof,
- no one trooping by, no one waiting to revere the mummy.
- Turn now, moving your eyes past St. Basil's
- preposterous domes, coming to rest—
- your back to Lenin, facing the doors of GUM,
- the vast arcade once filled with long damp lines
- of gray-clad, gray-skinned people
- waiting grimly for potatoes, for cabbage,
- for poorly sewn clothes that would soon shred—
- dreary goods for patient comrades in silent queues.
- Look there, see? over the entranceway—
- an icon of Jesus now stares across the Square,
- straight at lonely Lenin.
- And through the new plate-glass doors—
- a Calvin Klein display.
- Lenin, Jesus, and Calvin Klein.
- Welcome to millennium Moscow.
