A Poem by Rimas Uzgiris

The Green Bridge

I walk somewhere at the world’s end
In Wilno, by a bridge called Green.
– Czesław Miłosz

We walked across that bridge for years
and saw, or didn’t see, the proletarian heroes
pointing toward the promised land: worker bees
in bulky peasant skirts, puffy linen trousers
cast in bronze, soldiers – only helmeted grunts,
but how many distinctly remember the rest?

The Green Bridge has hidden its ghosts far below
like trolls amid graffiti, butts, and broken glass,
dreaming of a future that never came to pass…
Stone vases perch on pedestals, signifying nothing now.
There was a way of life, and only the desperate bellow
to have it back. But if kings can stay, why not the proles?

Yes, of course, the difference was the occupation. I know.
Yet who were the Party’s leaders if not our own?
We put the blame on someone else when neighbors
were the everyday source of fear. Banished – some say
the statues lie in dungeons, gray as the clothes they wore,
tilted on cracked concrete, among rags, crusts and rats

who sometimes climb across an outstretched brazen arm
and seem to spy, following a finger, a future free of arms.

Rimas Uzgiris is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in the Paris Review, Barrow Street, Hudson Review, Poetry Review (UK) and other journals. He is author of North of Paradise (Kelsay Books), Tarp (poems translated into Lithuanian, shortlisted for Poetry Book of the Year), translator of poetry collections by Ilzė Butkutė (A Midsummer Night’s Press), Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe), Marius Burokas (Parthian), Aušra Kaziliūnaitė (Parthian), and Judita Vaičiūnaitė (Shearsman). Uzgiris holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark. Recipient of a Fulbright Grant and a NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.