Monumental Is More than a Question of Scale

Magnificently sited, on the choicest real estate,
The Soviet war monuments weight Central Europe
down:
Les Beaux-Arts bloated. Buda must endure, on Gellert
Hill,
A giantess who holds aloft a palm leaf. Fatally
For anything but levity, it looks much like a fish
Mullet or salmon, say—and she a fishwife. Pest, too
flat
To be a pedestal, escapes, but in the afternoon
Is in the shadow of that figure. Bratislava (Press
burg, if you come by Autobahn) has its memorial
As floodlit focus for an avenue of cypresses.
A marble kiosk as discreet as Speer Berlin ignores;
Vienna screens a Worker Militant in fountain jets.
USSR does better for itself. In Volgagrad,
Colossal, in a strictest sense, the sword-uplifting Rus
Defends and is the Motherland; and in Odessa, plain,
Remote, an obelisk of dark red granite claims a shore,
Commemorating who knows what. The possibilities,
The Ukraine being what it is, are numberless and grim.
In ten more years, or twenty, will these tries, obtrusive
now,
Become invisible as Sherman on Fifth Avenue,
Or have the force of Liberty Enlightening the World?
Remember Liberty was meant to honor Robespierre,
Not Ellis Island. If today it credits anyone
It’s Gustave Eiffel, who contrived her brilliant skeleton.
And, I remind you, it’s the dead of whom the figures
speak.
The huddled masses in the ageless European snow,
American and German, Russian, Czech, Hungarian,
Now neither yearn nor breathe, nor know if they are
tired or poor.
Already it is as if all the sites had shrunk to one,
Yet as effective it as any since the stone was rolled
And openness itself was tribute to an Easter morning.
Gateway also, classic, broad, and free, but whose whole
fame
Once symbolized a wall, the resurrection secular
Transforms it in our very eyes to its own offering.
Its previous associations are not fortunate;
They vanish as the floodlights sweep the youth who
line the top.
No better end than this: champagne on high in raw
young hands;
The stones their fathers’ hands laid down; replacement
linden trees.