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For those who don't know: Stalingrad is a city (I think--a city or a battlefield) in Russia. In 1943, during WWII, Hitler's soldiers were sent there to fight the Russians. It is very cold there. There were small hospitals; the medical attention was less than competent. People died.

Now:

Stalingrad

How did you survive the night?
Snow punished the air
The frozen ground
And the huddled, breathing masses clothed
In the black of ash and destruction.
Ravenous cold bit and tore at
Fingertips, faces,
The edges of happy memories
And faces of loved ones
Were trodden on,
Turning to the unsung footprints
Of dirty snow
Left behind as the drums pulsed on.

Tell me,
How did you survive Stalingrad?
I imagine you dancing between bullets
Soaring gracefully away from
Bombs like overripe fruit splashed upon the tarmac
Russian men, bundled in furs and nightmares
-Men just like you-
Rushing forward with knives
Stained with rusty blood?
Whose blood stained their blades, their bullets?
Was it yours?
I think not;
But then, you never told me--
Were you even there?

Life and Death know how I
Searched desperately
In the dunes of shifting snow
In the crude, drafty hospitals
Ignoring the moans of victims of
Military drafts and hypothermia,
In the mortuary amid the grinning corpses.
Free, they told me, I am free,
And I half wished that I had found you there
With peace laying over you like a Christmas gift
-A soft blanket to ward away the war’s icy breath-
Or found you in the hospital
So I could nurse you back to health
And send you home
To your mother and sister
To a place where there were no nightmares, no guns,
No people with crippled lungs and broken souls.

But be honest:
Were you there?
Were you among the forced marches
The calculated starvation
The misery of those who knew
-And did not know-
Their fate?
Were you forced to freeze and burn and kill
Or did you come willingly
To abandon the agony of the past
Drown our bitter parting in the blood of horror
Like I did?
Many of us thought
That Stalingrad, that barren nothing
Would cleanse us
Show us enough misery
So that nothing seemed so bad
Desensitize us to suffering so we could bear the pain
And it did.

But you weren’t there, were you?
You had no need.
You stayed with the whole, the healthy, the unaffected
In the distant world
That, for us
-the survivors of Stalingrad-
Will always be tainted by the screams of dying strangers
Dying friends
Dying humans
(strange, how similar
We are in death.
No one came there to die
Waist-deep in snow.
Was that how they planned their demise
All along? Or was it
Just
Bad
Luck?)
Would you know? Were you there?
No…you were elsewhere
Floating freely in the Tuscan air
Feasting on tomatoes grown beneath the
Italian sun
In a familiar land
Unaware of the suffering
-A small part, caused by you alone-
No, you weren’t there
In Stalingrad
That was reserved for
Those who had looked
Fate, Bad Luck, Death, and Heartbreak in the face
And you, I know,
Never felt the need to.
While we recover
From missing limbs
Clumsy heartbeats
And stitches where our souls used to be,
You remain whole, untarnished,
And ignorant of what happened in the snows
Of Stalingrad.

~

Bit long, yes.
Be harsh.

The inspiration came from a whisper... didn't it?
For no one thinks for the Battle of Stalingrad.

Very visionary, if I may say. Keying in on certain traits.. the footprints in the snow, the hospitals, and the wounds (stitches where our souls used to be).

Very slight, yet all powerful in their own subtle way.

You also had some great metaphores lurking in the midst.


And I particularly enjoyed the word choice. Using verbs one might not at first consider for their outward impression, say the word Drown in this line.



It was all very clean, not very concise, but the length was needed for the over all impression. As I saw it, the length was almost symbolic of the time spent battling, freezing, dying, in the snow of Stalingrad.

You see, I could write an essay on everything I saw. I spent a year learning how to do so. I can take each line, and decapitate every word and do an analysis on everything.

But...

1) That would take to long.
2) I am lazy.
3) That would uterly destroy the meaning of what this is.

It reads like an enormous poem.
Mayhaps you should move it there?
I really like it though, as Stalingrad is not a very popular subject.

I don't know what to tell you. The entire STYLE seems different from what you normally write, plus, the piece itself was surprising. I didn't know you cared about Russian history.
Brilliant.

Voxxx: Remember The Book Thief? That was my inspiration. And yeah, my poetry has shifted dramatically from its norm.

Des: Meant it to be that way. But did you LIKE it?

><

Just a bit. he smothers his feelings. But there was a hidden meaning here--that NO one CAUGHT.

*coff*