You had crouched to trace out a footprint in compact ice <br />with fingertips too frozen to feel, <br />glancing up at me and saying confidently, <br />'Two of them, probably infantry, traveling light, heading east <br />about an hour ahead of us, ' <br />when the clearing broke into gunfire and I hit <br />the ground rolling, watching <br />a line of small geysers in the snow drive through you. <br />Then I was alone, laying on my stomach <br />and fumbling for a nonexistent magazine with the numb, leaden fingers <br />of one who has averted death <br />far too long. I watched through the cold <br />as the puffs of steam that comprised your irregular breaths <br />faded into imperceptibility, and saw in your breathing <br />the future of our advance into Russia: <br />we were in a land where harbingers of our defeat sprung up daily <br />from the ice fields to proclaim with their rifles <br />a truth we would rather die than accept–– <br />a place where the only warmth <br />came from the whistle of a hot bullet. <br />And now as I turn over, face to an impotent sun for the last time, <br />my hand gathers a clod of snow, <br />and yet to me I could swear that I clench a sponge–– <br />that these rivulets of sour wine <br />anoint the hands that will soon hold the world.<br /><br />Sean McDowell<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/russia-1942/
