ZURMA SWARM

By: Mykola Bazhan
May 4, 2026

A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.

Till May
from October
load the Rhine
      the Ruhr,
load it with a blast!
The heart is a Browning
loose
      from its holster!
Closer your ranks,
ranks closer!
Stinnes:
      y’ hear?
It’s breathing
this mass of barricades.
Can’t stop ’em,
Step — not shriek
into this chain of chests.
      Clang go the swords of
      October.
When the hearts of the mines hark alarm,
when hearts flow like cast-iron oceans,
    all Germany will be the platform
    of all-European revolutions.
    And every day ROSTA is pulsing
    with explosions, the depths of drill bores,
for waiting there on the outposts
    are the Main, the Rhine, the Ruhr.
    O hundreds, your steps are like
      tempering.
    Brother,
    hold the line!
Our parade in the face of the Universe
    forward, forward, goes the line!
Load your bullets,
magazines ready for the melee.
Neither Stresemann nor Mueller
can bear the rasping of these teeth.
Manes winding in the glow.
The Rhine plays out to the end!
The USSR is our harbor,
October is our anchor.
    You hammered
    your motto
in a million heads —
    nothing could dampen
our universal October.
Heaved upon your shoulders
the revolution’s bloody halo
to keep you, German workers,
out of this tearful mire.
A volley from the tribune
into the jeering ranks:
Ruhr —
is a Commune,
    the Commune is Ruhr!
The wounded crater of the mouth
The hook of its roaring and cries.
In the wires and the pipes of the blaze
we’ll harness smelting to the mist.
And at night, when blast furnaces sleep,
our roar will scorch up the mines.
Zurma swarm, fully bleak
will hit hard on the armor of paunches
these steps of Bessemer steel
scratch your temples to the quick.
In the ore beneath your hearts
vibrates the USSR.
    The USSR:
    death
    from the hangar.
    Hit
    the roof,
fill the mineshafts with steel brine.
    Hey miners
    and diggers
    out of the mines!
The Ruhr will be a new Perekop.
    Toss your tongue blades deep
    into the dusty slag belly.
A steel hangar will rise
    on the Rhine and Slask.
    All Berlin’s morphine,
    its cabarets and harems
    will fall into the Rhine
    while rising comes
        not
LUDENDORFF OR POINCARÉ —
        LENIN.

— From the collection Short Poems (1923–1927). Translated by Ostap Kin, Ainsley Morse, and Mykyta Tyshchenko. Found in “Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul”: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry. Here we read:

Bazhan mobilizes violent military imagery in three poems that are, unlike similarly phrased Civil War poetry, not actually about wartime battlefields. Rather, he uses martial rhetoric to express support for the German people’s passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr/ Rhine territories, on the one hand, and more generally to promote the struggle to build socialism and fend off its enemies. The (military) march was the music of the age, and it drives poems like the above-cited “Zurma Swarm” (a reference to a trumpet-like Ukrainian folk instrument), “Ruhr-March” and “Aero-March.”

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ZURMA SWARM

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