UNTIL THE EMPIRES END IT WILL BE SO

Still in the costumes

of the old homelands

across the dividing ocean

the women picking

pickles on the page

of The Chicago Sunday Tribune

in 1903, picking pickles

for Lyman Budlong,

earning as little as

ten dollars per day

in current currency,

and you try to find

a poem about picking

pickles that would

connect to them,

illustrate their experience

more than the poems

for children and jokes

you keep coming up,

it's a funny subject,

apparently, limericks

just run off the tongue,

picking pickles,

not back-breaking,

monotonous work

on which an industrial

food empire

was founded. But

then, which empire

wouldn't be? You

leave the fields

of the Russian empire,

cross the ocean

and you find

yourself in the empire

of Lyman Budlong

(his private hunting

reserve just to the west

of his greenhouses

and agricultural fields,

just like an estate

of a Russian aristocrat)

and now in all

the quicksand empires

of the empire builders

of our time. Until

the empires end

it will be so.

28.04.2026