Second Thoughts, by Carl Kinsky

At the School Door, by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (Russia) 1897

Second Thoughts
 
I fold my hands atop my shepherd’s stick
and for a moment from the hallway stare                        
at boys like me whom the professor picked
to educate.  One student spots me there                                                              
while others concentrate on notes they’re scrawling.
I know if I step through the open door
I can’t turn back or stop the new day dawning
but sense a refuge here I’m yearning for.
 
The threshold crossed, I find myself reborn.
No more a peasant’s bastard child, I paint
bucolic scenes, once praised, now held in scorn,
by Bolsheviks, too bourgeois and quaint.
They hate my fawning portrait of the Czar.
From humble birth, perhaps I’ve strayed too far. 
​
Carl Kinsky

Carl Kinsky is a sonneteer masquerading as a criminal defense lawyer in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a quirky old town on the west bank of the Mississippi River.  He fancies himself a modern-day Pudd'nhead Wilson.

An Afternoon Fishing, by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (Russia) 1917

Nicholas ll, by by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (Russia) 1908