The Eastern Front

Two Madmen Were Beaten

Beaten badly
Can you see them?
More importantly
Can you feel them?

And so at Kursk tankers were burnt to death
Screaming within iron tombs

And at Stalingrad
Men perished calling for their mothers
By the hundreds of thousands
Burnt with jellied gasoline
Shot by snipers
Frozen to death
Blown apart

In Leningrad
The bones froze solid
in a three year siege

Behind the lines
The SS herded jews
And tore the breasts off villagers
One by one
With combat knives

Can you feel the madmen who were beaten?
Just little children
When they were brutalized
They determined, both of them
Never again to be humiliated

Others paid for it

Who knows the dark grey green horror
At the bottom of the world?
Who can stop the tanks
When they begin to move?
Or the death ovens
When they warm to exterminate?

Jew? Russian? Nazi? Partisan? German soldier.
Child.

A child dead in the street.
A child picking through corpses.
A child on the last German lines in 45.
A child rushing through the Russian winter night.
A little girl raped, by whom?

And does it matter? Because the rapes, once started, never stop.

Who will stop it?

Will you?

Can you?