Mother Russia

Would you not also want to return?
To where snow and ice and lonely soviet tracks
feel like glow?
Where something so dull and bleak, were it placed
anywhere else in the world,
sparkles and entrances and steals you
and becomes you!
Where something embedded with so much pain
calls to every thing you are
so that you can not let it go,
like an abused child who loves her father deeply--
more deeply and with more tears than you will ever know?
Who can evade the yearning
for a homeland you do not have,
but feel it deep within you all the same?
It is Russia I tell you!
It is the harshest land, the cruelest home,
but the one all lands call mother--
Mother Russia.
And who does not yearn for Mother?