Speaking Busybird Publishing Open Mic Night #106

By Laurie Smale

On Wednesday 20 November 2024, I attended the Busybird Publishing Open Mic Night #106 and shared a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko called ‘The Party Card.’

Laurie Smale at Busybird Publishing Open Mic Night #105 on Wednesday 16 October 2024

Special thanks to Kev Howlett for the use of this Live Video Footage from Facebook and Les Zig for being the Facilitator of the Open Mic Night.

Transcript

Laurie I just have you have a poem down here want to come up here and read your poem everyone please welcome Laurie.

Thank you Les.

Have you folk here ever experienced a poem and it had a profound effect on you and went on reverberating in your subconscious over the years and just didn’t go away?

Well that happened to me.

When I was 19 and as yet had to learn about life and the poem is Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem, The Party Card and it’s seen through the eyes of a little boy who finds himself in the aftermath of a tank battle and he’s trying to tend a Russian Lieutenant who is dying amidst all this carnage and death.

This tank battle in World War II. There really is an ode to the futility and stupidity of war.

I’ll pick up our story from there.

Passionate with silence unable to see when he asked me.

I took the party card from his pocket.

And small and tired and without understanding wandering in the flushed and smoking dark, met up with refugees moving East and somehow through the terribly flashing night we traveled without a map, the priest with his long grey hair and his rucksack and me and a sailor with a wounded arm.

Child crying.

Horse whinnying.

And answered to with love and with courage and white, white, the bell towers rang out speaking to Russia with a tocsin voice.

Wheatfields blackened round their villages.

In the woman’s coat I wore at the time.

I felt for the party card close to my heart.

So, this traumatised little boy all he had left was this flimsy Communist Party Card near his heart.

He didn’t know why and he had no idea what it all meant.

Wow thanks for bringing, way to bring the room down Laurie. It’s very powerful but very also