I could
If I wanted
Tell Moma that I won’t go.
I won’t go, I'll say,
To a new house,
To the new place,
To a land I’ve never seen.

I could
If I wanted
Tell them to take someone else --
Someone who has been in this place ever since she was a baby.
She wouldn’t care.
She doesn’t know about the hill down to my babushka’s house
Where the raspberries grow.
Where the apples hang in the trees.
That little girl hasn’t even seen winter in my village
With snow drifting hard against tree trunks,
And the cows breathing puffs like clouds in the air,
Ice on their nose.
The cold so sharp it cuts you.

I could
If I wanted
Stay here
With the “mamas” who’ve been taking care of me,
If they’ll let me stay.
I will live at the detsky dom
With my dress and my shoes
And my red Elmo
And paper so I can write letters
To Moma
Once I learn how to read and write.

If they would let me send them to her.

Or maybe
I’ll live in a tree.
A tree in our hamlet,
if I can walk that far to go back.
The tall birch tree that was small
when Mama was small,
But grew faster than she did.
Now it has branches
And crooks where I can sit
To look down the hillside.
To my babushka’s house,
Through the woods. Down the path.

I’ll pull turnips from the earth, gather eggs from the henhouse
just like I always have done.
I’ll walk to the village for fresh water from the well
and carry it
in wooden buckets with strong shoulders
just like my papa.
He would be proud.

Or
I’ll live with my big brother,
Watching him write
Big words
About things I don’t understand
And about love.
We’ll eat blini for breakfast
Because he likes them.
And no one tells him he can’t.

And when he has to leave for a while
I’ll live with my oldest sister.
I don’t remember where she lives
But I do know she knows I like bananas and apples.
We’ll sleep together with our eyes open
Until they drop shut.
Listening
to the rain on the metal roof
the wind rattling the windows
Waking when the rooster crows
In sunlight.
Koo-kuh-dee-kooooo.

My Moma is sad to leave, too.
She cried when we walked out the door --
And Nadezhda and Nina Washina and even Svetlana cried.
We all cried together.
And they all watched as the car drove away.
Children
My friends of only 10 months
Gazing out the window.

So
Why are we leaving if everyone’s so sad?
And what is there to go to?

Moma says there are mountains
In the new place.
And everyone else says there are toys and nice clothes
and a bedroom of my own.
I don’t need mountains,
Only the one hill.
I don’t need new toys
Only one toy to call my own.

But I know
I need love.
The love of my moma.

Moma says she would miss me
If I stay.
She says how will our family know about the way the
Mushrooms grow in the forest,
If I don’t tell them.
And how will they ever know my favorite Russian songs,
If I don’t sing them.

What you know first stays with you, my moma says.
And she wants me to always remember.
But just in case I forget
I will take a piece of the town wall.
It is older than any of us...all put together.

And I will take a little bag of Russian soil.

I cannot take the sky.
But Moma has told me the moon and stars are the same
where we are going
As the ones I’ve always seen.
She reminds me that she watched and wondered from so many miles away
if I was looking at the same stars as she
As she counted the days till she came for me.

And I’ll try hard to remember the songs,
And the sound of the rooster at dawn,
And how warm the cows’ milk is
When you taste it,
So my family will know
What I knew first.

And so I can remember, too.