With a perpetual eagle on his crumpled beret,
Grisha Hartyuk, the quiet C-average dropout,
shot himself in a friend's toilet
on finding a call-up summons in his mailbox.
He spent weeks on a hospital bed and survived.
The bullet had missed the heart by an inch.
He walks among us again, my lucky classmate
with a double life, the front of his suit patched.
Shall I now enlist among the bloody stoics
or join the goddamn cynics instead?—
he enquires of the scattered acacias,
his palm covering the hole in his chest.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem