Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The position of the wolf was once secure in political theory
before it was driven by urbanization back to that final wilderness,
e.g. Siberia, where it lingers still without, to anyone’s notice,
affecting contemporary politics. The plains sparkle in sunlight
as a helicopter rushes over the landscape: stunted birches
appear and disappear out on the snow-covered tundra
where all at once a wolf can be seen: it runs, it trips,
looks backward: someone has edited-in the hot gasps
of a dog to make us hear its fear: it is filmed close-up
and the camera is slightly jarred when the helicopter gunner
fires. The wolf is hit, rolls over in a swirl of snow,
then everything is still. Every year in the Soviet Union
more than 22,000 wolves were killed according to recent
statistics, and perhaps it is even yet a silent requirement
of Russian polity – menacing, inaccessible – which would explain
the cynical, obsessive precision of the hunting methods
both in the filmed sequence noted above, which,
with no comment, introduced a documentary on modern Siberia,
and also on the inner tundra where the wolf howls with hunger
in a nightmare only partially reclaimable. The facts about wolves
in Sweden at my disposal allow no conclusions, and yet,
within its territory, the wolf has developed local, independent
clans which have been identified as distinctive species. About
the role of the wolf in Russian politics 1875-1953, however,
we know more than we suppose: Stalin’s most wolf-like 
                                                                characteristic
was distrust, which grew in proportions never foreseen by classical
lupine theory. As early as in Aesop we can find sufficient examples
to maintain that Stalin’s role in political theory is basic:
the Wolf as Butcher masters to perfection the partition technique
which is the base of political equality. The jaws of the wolf
equal the Knife, and classical myth provides again the scenario
which ought to have haunted us earlier: hunting the Wolf became
in the Thirties a dominant trait in Soviet politics; he who wrote
“All power to the Soviets” three years before Kronstadt was now
the uncontested Butcher, the principle of absolute mistrust
had triumphed over Equality and the pack closed ranks around
                                                                                    Stalin
in the whirling snowstorm. The Bolsheviks had certainly planned
an equitous banquet of wolves, but forgotten the moment when
                                                                                 Knife
turns into Weapon and the feast into its opposite. The gasps
haunt me, the plains sparkle, the film invades the memory:
am I willing to test that project now when Stalin’s crimes
are rostered and surveyed, now when his blood-thirst, along with
the prospects which made it possible, have all been analysed?
Zoologists can emend, on essential points, classical mythology,
refract the Stalinoid language: lacking both project and theory
the pack makes real the apophthegm: “To each according to his
                                                                          need,
from each according to his ability.” It refutes the picture
that pursues me and, in the end, obliges me to abandon
my language: gazing at Stalin, letting the wolf run off.