When I look for the grandest day of my life,

rummaging in all  I’ve gone through and seen.

I name without doubt or internal strife

October 25, 1917.

The Smolny throbs in a buzz of excitement.

Grenades hang on seamen like partridges.

Bayonets zigzag like flashes of lightning.

Below stand machine-gunners belted with cartridges.

No aimless shuffling in the corridors;

with bombs and rifles  no one’s a novice.

“Comrade Stalin wants to see you.

Here’s the orders:

armoured cars –to the General Post Office.”

“Comrade Trotsky’s instructions.”

“Right!” ─he dashed forward

and the man’s navy ribbons flashed: “Aurora”.

Some run with dispatches,

Others stand  arguing,

still others click rifle-bolts –

no two figures the same.

And here, no token of greatness or grandeur,

Brisk but inconspicuous, Lenin came.

Already led by Lenin into battle,

they didn’t know him from portraits yet;

bustled, hollered, exchanged banter,

with a quickfire of oaths, hail-fellow-well-met.

And there, in that long-wished-for iron storm

Lenin, drowsy with fatigue, it would seem,

pacing, stopping, hands clasped behind back,

dug his eyes into the motley scene.

Once I saw him stabbing them

into a chap in puttees,

dead-aiming, sharp-edged as razors,

seizing the gist as pincers would seize,

dragging the soul from under words and phrases.

And I knew, everything was disclosed and understood,

everything those eyes were raking for:

where the shipwright and miner stood,

what the peasant and soldier were aching for.

He kept all races within his sight,

all continents where the sun goes setting or dawning;

weighed the whole globe in his brain by night and in the morning:

“To all,

Every and each,

slaves of the rich

one another

hacking and carving;

to you we appeal this hour:

Let the Soviets take over

government power!

Bread to the starving!

Land to the farmers!

Peace to the peoples

and their warring armies!”