Ruta Skendeliene Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

This poem arises from my birthplace, Vorkuta — a northern Siberian town built beside one of the Soviet Union’s most brutal Gulags. I wrote it to honor the half-million prisoners who vanished into its permafrost and to acknowledge the land that witnessed their suffering. The tundra, the sky, and the wolves in this poem are not metaphors but living presences that shaped my earliest sense of the world. Where the Wolves Howl My Name is an origin story born from inherited silence, ancestral survival, and the haunting memory of a place that chose me long before I understood it.

Where the Wolves Howl My Name

I was born on the hottest day
of a humid August summer,
the North Star shyly pointing
toward the eastern Ural Mountains—
a great snake sliding north to south
splitting Europe and Asia,
a primal beast with its tail
in a land where snow melts for two months
and blazing heat briefly smothers
the memory of the rest
of the year’s subarctic cold.
In Vorkuta, a northern Siberian town
that housed one of Russia’s most brutal Gulags,
a fortress of barracks built to round up
inconvenient enemies of the state
hauled in on cattle trains.
The astonished tundra watched in awe
and stored its memories carefully
so one day the truth would be told.
Prisoners arrived in stinking cattle cars
that rattled from Europe to the Urals
for what felt like eternity.
The doors opened and spat out
those who survived the ride—
waste on frozen ground.
Armed guards herded them
into barracks like animals
led to slaughter.
Half a million human lives
were reduced to sludge—
fighting stark cold, exhaustion,
slave labor, starvation, disease.
They ended in mass graves
dug in shallow trenches
behind rows of wooden barracks.
No crosses, no markers, no names—
only disappearance
into trash piles assigned
to useless human remains.
The tundra had never seen this before.
Its serene, breathtaking landscape
with deep northern skies
had been a peaceful space
for roaming deer,
arctic foxes, and polar bears.
Suddenly its deafening silence
was torn by screams of pain,
clattering guns, and moans of despair.
The virgin tundra’s beauty was torn open,
defiled, broken.
Death, dressed like a beggar,
with a toothless mouth 
lingered at the Gulag gates,
a lusty grin glowing on her ghostly face,
prepared for a lavish bloody feast.
The tundra swallowed tears,
fell to her knees, and in the
pile of corpses carefully
gathered victims’ tears.
She stored them like jewels
in icy drops on tall grass blades
reaching toward the sky.
The tears of martyrs hung
between heaven and earth
and became stars.
The sky above the frozen land
was lit by myriads
of newborn celestial lights
the night became bright
as day in northern twilight.
The tundra, a true poet,
could not tell the story—
she had no voice.
So she converted suffering
she witnessed over the years
into the mythic image
of northern lights bleeding
across the Arctic sky.
Below that freshly lit sky,
low shrubs and tall grass,
drunk on victims’ blood,
opened red blooms
across the vast steppe
on the hottest day of the year
before dawn, when I was born.
Wolves gazing at the horizon
howled at the full moon rising.
A strange place to be born,
yet it welcomed me.
I carry the freedom fighters' blood
of a man who survived the Gulag,
though my ancestral homeland
lay a thousand miles west—
in Europe's heart
The tundra’s silence
entered me at birth
and never let go.
I didn’t choose it—it chose me,
In the depth of night I still hear
the steppenwolves' howl
across the vast fields calling 
through the ancient quiet
that shaped my first breath

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