TRENCH FOOT

 

The important thing is to keep your socks dry.

The important thing is to

keep your socks dry, as the cold seeps

into your bones, and the damp.

Somewhere an old woman in a cramped hut

watches television, and you are called upon

to buy her a larger house.

 

Not long ago, you tried in vain. To show up

and proclaim, ‘I am not a cannibal!’ Yet to grow up

among them in libraries, monasteries, and the local philharmonic

is to develop a taste

for flesh and fatalism. What could be done,

what indeed. The mogilizatsiya of the soul:

 

After a while, you even enjoy these games

Yourself. The blood tastes sweetest

when they are little, dripping

from the green of a surgical gown.

Yet there is also the tiredness

of Monday mornings, of the din,

of stale cigarettes amidst the unquiet

Crossfire.

 

You think of Shostakovich,

Who stood up to one kind of moustache

and not so much to the other, Our kind.

Easier to be brave in the hypothetical…

 

…on one side peace, on the other, land, flat-screens and washing machines.

 

Naturally,

I chose

The latter.