• 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.