A dishy dark-pupiled Ukrainian
Олександр Гнатович Шаргей
His mother married his pater in January
and Yuri infiltrated the world that June
 
She taught French in Kiev; a social
activist, thus, she was declared insane
His great-grandfather had battled Napoleon
His father loved physics. Yuri read his books.
 
While fighting on WWI’s Caucasian Front, Yuri
filled notebooks with ideas like ‘Kondratyuk's Loop’
which reckoned trajectories for orbit rendezvous – for
mastering an orbit, then promoting ones to better them

selves as on a rilled turntable a needle jumped over
strains of Shastakovich’s ‘To October’ to inspire
Yuri to design a massive wooden grain elevator
without a single nail – and name it ‘Mastodon’
 
Nails were few – Mastodon’s construction was clever
but construed as a subversion – it was without nails!
Re: a 13,000-ton Siberian elevator sans nails must be
designed to collapse, blockhead-bureaucrats figured
 
out rivaled the NKVD labeled him a saboteur so off
Yuri went to spend three years gutted in the gulag
Later, in Conquest of Interplanetary Space (1925),
he explicated the gravitational-slingshot-technique
 
He also authored To Those Who Would Read when
Building (a spacecraft) earlier; it went unpublished
The title might suggest that not everyone who
built would undertake first to read (as he had)
 
That only the select would read when building –
That it was for those that the book was intended
He volunteered for the Red Army in 1941
Nazis shot him dead while fixing a cable
 
Oleksandr Ignatyevich Shargei was his real name;
Yuriy Kondratyuk was an identity he had assumed
The first Yuriy Kondratyuk was a student at Kiev
University who had died of tuberculosis in 1921
 
Oleksandr had been conscripted into the White
Army at age 25, the penalty for which was death
Accordingly, he became Yuriy Kondratyuk instead
becoming a misplaced student who had died of TB
 
carrying on as if nothing had happened living secretly
while in plain view. Once he’d fluttered from them –
he’d run for Poland but he was nabbed at the border –
& allowed to escape only because he looked deathly
 
So ‘Deathly’ had escaped execution by erecting alternative
identities but a Nazi bullet ensured an end to his deceptions
He fell forward – Oleksandr Shargei; Yuriy Kondratyuk –
the cable fell from his grasp; he tried to stand; he couldn’t
 
The Kamen-na-Obi granary: largest in the world, it
no longer stands either, but not for want of its nails
Both it and its maker crushed themselves out; died