Days long with innocent pleasure,
The simple trust of childhood
Unquestioned continuity.
Endless summer days
Fruit laden trees
Rich harvest.
Days of broken innocence,
Splintered shards of trust
Famine strips home bare
Of mother and sisters
Boyhood ends
Harvest fails.
Days of growing
Into manhood,
Far from home,
Mind seeking,
Challenging, probing,
Harvest seeding.
Bayonet ruptures
Adolescent pride
Certainty swept away
In crowded cattle trucks
To Siberian death
Harvest icy tears.
Very touching. I'm speechless...
ReplyDeleteThank you. My father, his mother and two sisters were taken from their home in Eastern Poland by the Russians. They endured two years of Siberia and then when Stalin changed sides, they were released and left to make their own way across Russia, over the Urals to the embarcation ports for Persia. They were skeletal and wracked with disease by the time they got there. My grandmother died of starvation but my dad and my aunts survived. Dad died last October at the age of 90. This is my tribute to him.
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