(Editor’s note: On Feb. 22, poet Frank Pagani, a former WAG contributor who is marking his 10th anniversary as a Westchester-based corporate and marketing communications consultant, sent us this email:
“As a lover of Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, I recently noted that (Saturday) March 5 will mark the 80th anniversary of (the first performance of) his epic Leningrad Symphony…a musical work created in defiance of Nazi oppression and in spite of seemingly overwhelming odds and staggering cruelty inflicted on Leningrad’s population.
“The unfortunate events now unfolding in Ukraine reminded me that the universality of Shostakovich’s creation speaks beyond a specific moment in world history. In fact, as I have imagined it in the attached poem, the music by the acclaimed Russian composer tragically resonates now for the Ukrainians, who are similarly being imperiled.”
Here is Frank’s poem: )
Oh, Ukraine,
We Hear Your Defiant Cries
In the Leningrad Symphony
(Feb. 23-24, 2022)
By Frank Pagani
Oh, Ukraine,
we hear your defiant cries
in the Leningrad Symphony
when starving musicians
eighty years ago
took to their instruments
and miraculously, in spite of staggering hunger,
first performed Dmitri’s masterwork –
a blistering, mournful, shattering indictment
against the “soulless Nazi war machine,”
the conductor of the brave ensemble recalled.
Oh, Ukraine,
in this searing music
we hear your victorious cries
rage against the invasion by the descendants of a people
who suffered in an epic siege and survived
unspeakable cruelty.
Oh, Ukraine,
we hear your inevitable triumph,
in the pain and suffering Putin
inflicts on you,
for the land he claims his own,
his dreams are doomed
just as Hitler’s were at Leningrad’s doorstep,
900 days of terror, one million souls
memorialized in four movements.
Oh, Putin,
listen carefully
and you will hear tyranny’s defeat,
yes defeat,
in every impassioned note
Shostakovich conceived
amid devastation and isolation,
his symphonic declaration of hope
soars in the hearts of all humankind.
Oh, Ukraine,
we weep.
