Marie Unger, Estonian poet
In a speech in Estonia on Wednesday, Barack Obama praised the country for having stood up to the Soviet Union 25 years ago with a two-million person human chain. With one eye on Russia’s recent incursion into Ukraine, he also promised that NATO would defend Estonia and the other two Baltic republics, Latvia and Lithuania, if they are threatened. In the course of the speech, he quoted the Estonian poet Marie Under.
I think Obama and his speechwriters may have used the poem as the emotional center of the speech since it allowed the president to join two themes: Estonia’s freedom from the USSR and Russia’s recent escapade. At times it sounds as though Obama was directly answering Under. First, here’s her cri de coeur, which (as Obama notes) was written during the Stalinist takeover of Estonia. Under and her family fled to Sweden in 1944, living for a year in a refugee camp:
Denunciation
By Marie Under
I cry aloud with all my people’s mouths,
our land is smitten by a plague of fear and lead,
our land is shadowed by the gallows tree our land
a common graveyard, huge with dead.
Who’ll come to help? Right here, at present, now!
Because the patient’s weak, has lost his hold.
But, like the call of birds, my shouting fades in emptiness:
the world is arrogant and cold.
The sighing of the old, the baby’s cry —
do they all run to sand, illusion, fail?
Men, women groan like wounded deer
to those in power all this is just a fairy-tale.
Dark is the world’s eye, its ear is deaf,
the powerful lost in madness or stupidity.
Compassion’s only felt by those whom suffering breaks,
and sufferers alone have hearts like you and me.
And here’s the excerpt from Obama’s speech where he quoted the poem:
During the long Soviet occupation, the great Estonian poet Marie Under wrote a poem in which she cried to the world, “Who’ll come to help? Right here, at present, now!” And I say to the people of Estonia and the people of the Baltics, today we are bound by our treaty alliance. We have a solemn duty to each other. Article 5 is crystal clear. An attack on one is an attack on all. So if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, who’ll come to help, you’ll know the answer: the NATO alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America, right here, present, now. (Applause.)
We’ll be here for Estonia. We will be here for Latvia. We will be here for Lithuania. You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again. (Applause.)
When you want to reach deep into people’s hearts, there’s nothing like poetry to strengthen the message.
