Brisbane Summer Nights - Part Ii Poem by Roger K.A. Allen

In 1955, when I was a boy,
German soldiers still shuffled,
Anonymous,
With vacant eyes,
Forgotten, now old,
Bound by barbed wire
And the haunting howl
Of the white wolves,
Of the Arctic wind,
And the rhythm of searchlights
Dancing like summer sunflowers,
On bleak pine walls,
And on these lost lives
East of the Urals
And their cruel Arian utopia,
Their Third Reich.

Waiting wives,
And pain-waves,
Chill ripple,
Through the pale pond
Of their stunned Fatherland,
And the hate of an aggrieved foe,
Whose bright embers,
Fanned by the bellows
Of burning years,
In the dark forge of their memories, Of
Stalingrad
And the “Great Patriotic War”.

It was Hitler’s Ozemandias,
Lost in the sands of a million lives,
This Ratkreig,
In Comrade Stalin’s tractor factory
And by the silent sentinels
Of cement silos,
And the rubble of his civic dream,
Along the mighty Volga,
This national monument,
Flowing down to Astrakhan,
Through the endless Steppes
To the gallop of Russian ponies,
And strutting ostrich
Endless grass wind-waves,
South to the distant Caspian.

The Wehrmacht,
Then still invincible,
With eye-rings of summer sweat
And dusty goggles,

Of blond boys,
Like sharp-eyed barn owls,
With field glasses,
Searching for field-mice foe,
On roads of yellow powder,
Fine-ground,
By boots of black leather,
Like their ersatz coffee
And forever-heading east,
Beyond the Don,
To the fabled prize
Of Stalingrad.

This Grand Armée,
Of many nations,
Engulfed by the space,
Of Hitler’s “Lebensraum”,
Suffocating in its vastness,
And sinking in slow death
In this quicksand-silo
Of dusty Russian wheat.

And Winter…,
Napoleon’s nemesis,
All-freezing, mind-slowing,
A silent death,
Life-leaching from a night picket,
An ice sculpture in the morning light,
Or a frozen template,
Some mother’s son,
Tattooed feldgrei and red,
Into an ice-rink road
A compacted man,
Entombed, compacted,
By tanks and tyres,
Until the thaw.

Or the quick death.
A life’s punctuation mark.
A sniper’s full-stop.
A punched period.
On a hated helmet,
Blowing a gouache
Of brain, bone, hair,
And thoughts of home,
On a frozen factory wall.
Or a death by brick dust
Steel and nitre
Of a silent shell.

It is so Shakespearean,
This story of Stalingrad,
Of ruined families,
And women who waited,
In their hearts’ tundra
This desolation of two tyrants;
Hitler's Ozemandias.