All Comments on 'After B.Okudzhava--a free variation'

Dead by KGB on false accusations of being a German spy & mother too was imprisoned in the Gulag !?! But tge Soviet Union honoured him as a Hero of tge Soviet Union & he is a popular Poet in both Russia & Poland & he is honoured in the Cech Republic too !!?!?

I do not want to speculate as to why the erstwhile Soviet Union behaved in such manner to it's own citizens because the Soviet Union was a true friend of India even when that champion of " democracy" USA was proppin' up tinpot dictators in Pak , against India !?!

I read a few poems by him & i was overwhelmed with admiration for his writing skills : thank you Senna for bringing him alive on Lit. ,!! 5-ed .

Ashesh--thank you!

Okudzhava fate was not the only one. You may read the stories of Pushkin, Lermontov, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Cvetaeva, Mandelstam, Babel, Eddie Rosner, Brodsky, ... Or of Polish poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, or of ... too many to list them here.

I second Ash's recommendation in PF&D. Wonderful economy of language.

I was at first thrown a bit in the last stanza, but when I looked up "grain" and discovered it could be an intransitive verb as well as a noun, the pieces of the poem came nicely together, at least for me. I found myself melancholic, not overly so, just enough to think about love and suffering.

Interesting that the first two stanza had such elementary rhymes and the last had none, although the end letters of the abab form were the same... leads to several conclusions not expressed here. An ignorance of the subject matter makes further comment impossible, but, it was recommended by gm I had to look. I'll read the other comments now.

"a couple grains in my heart" means "a bullet in my heart" (bullet = projectile). You may Google on "bullet grains", or read:

http://www.luckygunner.com/lounge/choosing-right-bullet-weight/

In particular, this quote:

"Bullets are measured in a unit of mass called grains (abbreviated “gr.”). One pound is equal to 7000 grains, and there are 437.5 grains in an ounce. Bullets can weigh anywhere between 15 grains for the lightest 17 HMR bullets all the way up to 750 grains for the heavier .50 BMG rifle loads."

"had ... rhymes and the last had none" -- hm, an interesting comment (so-to-speak).

"leads to several conclusions not expressed here." -- I see... :)

The total rhyme scheme is:

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---- abab - caca - acbc ----

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