Grab your mug of hot chocolate, find a fuzzy blanket, and settle in for a remarkable trip across the shivering tundra known as Siberia. Regardless of previous images lodged within you concerning this frigid expansion, today’s journey of words will transport you in a distinct way and leave you with a newfound appreciation for these distant saints and the writer who captures their world.
Vivian Hyatt attended the 2022 Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers' Conference in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Imagine her excitement on awards night when she received first place in the category of poetry! The poem she submitted to the competition was "This Siberia". She says of her creation: "Note that it is a poem in four parts, and it should be read out loud and at one sitting to get the cadence and the mood."
This Siberia
1.This Siberia
These silent snowscapes
these mounds and frozen drifts
these long blue shadows
these crusted trees
of pine and birch
these unsmirched tracks
these plumes of smoke
from the wooden houses
these laden roofs
this frozen river
this endless white
this silence –
this Siberia.
2. Sixteen Hours on the Trans-Siberian Railway
We eat and doze and read and eat again.
The birches in the snow glide by
stands of birches
scattered birches
birches.
The villages glide by
wooden villages
one named
Forgotten
smoke pluming from chimneys
and the snow glides by
and the wooden villages and the birches.
We stop in a town named Winter
high rises and high wires and train yards and
rusting steel and a high rusting bridge over something snow-covered.
Here in the town named Winter
the snow is shoveled and scraped and dirty and drab.
We are glad
when we move on and the birches glide by again
and the snow.
3. Bolshoi Ungut
The road ends at this village deep in snow
deep under the mountain
deep with pines.
Here narrow foot-paths for the narrow life
in the narrow wooden houses
with their painted window frames and painted fences.
Here a wood pile and an axe
there a cow in its narrow shed sustaining warm life inside the warm houses
felt boots warming on the clay stove where the children sleep.
Here blind Nikolai and his wrinkled Anna with their Bible verse on the wall
with their Bible.
They stand and pray and weep and are thankful
here in this narrow life in the narrow village
where the road ends.
4. Celsius has crept to minus 41
The school bus has not come by.
School closes for the children at minus 35.
Two of our group left last night along the dark and snow-blown road,
darkness
and blowing snow
all the way
to Krasnoyarsk.
They say tires can burst in this cold.
We pray they made it.
There is no cell phone contact.
This is February.
It began snowing in October.
The river will thaw
come May.
Living With Eternal Intentionality®
“He has put eternity in the heart of man” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
Before reading Vivian’s poem, what were your thoughts about Siberia?
Did the writer change your perspective? If so, how?
Given the opportunity, what question would you want to ask Nikolai and Anna?
What question would you like to ask Vivian?
Accomplished writer Vivian Hyatt attended the 2022 Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers' Conference in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Imagine her excitement on awards night when she received first place in the category of poetry! The poem she submitted to the competition was "This Siberia". As previously stated, she says about her work, "Note that this is a poem in four parts, and it should be read out loud and at one sitting to get the cadence and the mood."
For more of Vivian’s writings, visit her website VivianHyatta.com Swings of Contentment
