White Night by Diana Woodcock The name had changed once again by then, Lenin no longer in vogue. I can’t remember the year, though I’m sure I boarded the train before midnight, a midsummer white night to be clear, with the silvery light lingering over the streets, embankments and the Neva, the Arctic Circle only a few miles north, St. Petersburg on its forty- four islands, Pushkin losing his life in a duel there, Dostoyevsky sentenced to hard labor, the Nazi nine-hundred-day-long blockade, thousands dying of starvation, the War Victims monument with its warning, No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten. I was bound for the Polish border but unwilling to leave, so when he hesitated there in the doorway of my compartment, grasping his one small suitcase, dressed in his soldier’s uniform, a half-smile on his face, I knew even as I reached for my Russian-English phrasebook and he began settling in that we would not be sleeping through our one white night. Diana Woodcock QATAR In 2006 Diana Woodcock received an Honorable Mention in the Nimrod /Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry Competition and was an International Pub li cation Prize winner in Atlanta Review 's Poetry Competition. She's been the recipient of residencies at Vermont Studio Center and the Everglades National Park . Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod , Atlanta Review , Wisconsin Review , Hawaii Pacific Review , Brooklyn Review , Whiskey Island Magazine, Blue Fifth Review, Hobble Creek Review, Quercus Review, The World and I, The Homestead Review, White Heron, Small Brushes, Creative Juices, Pudding and other journals, as well as in anthologies such as Susan B & Me , Native West's Least-loved Beasts of the Really Wild West and Pig Iron Press's Frontier: Custom and Archetype.