The Gulag Archipelago (1918-2000)

by

Hay Machine

What else is the head of Papa good for?

(Zoya Leshcheva admits to defecating in a severed monumental head of Stalin)

Though I forget
the Russian names and all the details
one picture vividly remains
innocent women (as though that mattered)
still in Summer silk and cotton dresses of arrest
pulled frozen trees down inside the Arctic circle
to make tools and wheel-barrows
with which they then dug
the useless White Sea and Baltic Canal

A quarter of a million souls were mortified
their flesh grated like soft cheddar cheese
relentlessly their cheeks were pressed on jagged tin
and after removal of the summer dress that they were murdered in
thrown onto sledges frozen
their last sound a dull clonk

Fish bones and black chaff
to feed the torment not the prisoner
all this forgotten
were it not for Solzhenitsyn Alexander

Sixty Million people murdered
in our time on our watch
countless more survived
countless millions more besides
in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's testament
sixty million souls in this evil torment died

Evil does exist and knows itself
it took a huge administration
to undress and grate this cheese
the brutal truth we see and read and know its foul remains
still pounding and slitting perishing souls in Grozny
the evil in us all can passively this endless killing more beget

All we have to do is to forget

NEXT?
Why don't you look at An aged veteran of World war 2
by: Francis Duggan
from: Wonthaggi, Victoria, Australia

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