by Corey Weinstein
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| In just four weeks in the summer of 1941 the German Wehrmacht wrought unprecedented destruction on four Soviet armies, conquering central Ukraine and killing or capturing three-quarters of a million men. This was the battle of Kyiv–one of the largest and most decisive battles of World War II and, for Hitler and Stalin, a battle of crucial importance. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were taken in the aftermath of the battle of Kiev, but very few would survive German captivity. —Arthur Grimm, “Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East,” Semantic Scholar |
I live in a breadbasket,
That’s the whole problem,
Fields of wheat, of barley
for the soup the family loves,
Carrots, onions, meat scraps
or beets for borscht that stains,
Blood reluctantly on our hands.
None of them: the Whites, the Reds,
the Iron Crossed Pure Whites,
the new Green with wallets and promises,
None of them know our voices,
taste our beautiful farms,
Now still again the Reds attack,
and we are stained again
with what must be done,
I was nine standing at the pit’s edge,
Some cheered, not me, some retched,
The ground heaved and belched for a week,
Father cooked their lunches, never recovered,
A drunk in Kyiv gutter dirty to the end.
Again the shrieks of bombs and moms,
Blasts and dust and blood in the air,
These Reds of famine and orders and lies
roll over our wintered earth to plant
their seeds of our despair, now still again.
Corey Weinstein is a retired homeopathic physician whose poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum, California State Poetry Society, and Jewish Currents. He currently attends writing classes at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in San Francisco and hosts their Poetry Circle. Weinstein has also been published in a number of medical/academic publications. He was an advocate for prisoner rights as the founder of California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.
