No Trespassing Poem by Alexandre Nodopaka

In transit from Kyiv to somewhere
we didn’t know yet except that
a barbed wire circled our refugee camp.

I recall crawling underneath with other kids
to collect live bullets by the hundreds
from the bottom of creeks.

Here in the midst of dense woods
Wehrmacht soldiers stripped their chevrons
and medals off their uniforms.

They disposed of them in rivers and ponds
and creeks by shedding their guilty belongings
so as not to be identified

with the madmen they served.
All we kids wanted
was the charcoal flakes in the brass shells.

To get it, one held the cartridge by its tail
between index and thumb and wedge the point
of the bullet into an indent in a flat rock

and with a smaller disc-shaped rock
strike the midriff of the bullet where its head
met the cartridge with a precise sharp blow

so that its cylindrical belly spilled its powdered
black entrails. As we did it we madly hoped
to crawl back alive under the bob wire.