Bastogne 1944
Bastogne 1944
It was cold, so cold because they hadn’t given
us warm clothes for the winter, or to die in:
Germans and SS surrounded us and
the aroma of their hot food and Heil Hitler!
warm fur coats drifted by us
as the freezer closed in, my Thompson was
a cold block of ash and black metal but
working well, so well, so very well
and the drum magazine (music to my ears )had
a hundred rounds and I started naming each
bullet Fritz, or Franz, or Helmut, or Adolf
then stopped at eight when I ran out of names
and when they attacked we took them away,
from their mothers and lovers and their pastors
and brothers, made widows of their wives and
whores of their sisters
but all this was a long time ago and I remember
the cold and the wind as they charged at us screaming
“ AAAGGGHH!” which sounds the same in Hindi or
Belgian or Yiddish or Scottish, as their warm chests exploded
and bearded faces imploded and their meat and their teeth
spread like confetti in the loud Thompson flashes ,
(like a party strobe)
which was kind of unsettling to see them die like men
for what they believed in:
and the SS came out and shot all the wounded so they
danced like devils to the tune of my Thompson gun
(oh what fun)
we caught one in braces with Lieber standarte
sewn on his arm and we kicked him in rage and in pain
then spat in his eye, until the Captain said,
” information!...enough, we don’t want him to die!”
and the SS man let out a sigh as long as the sky
then the morning came and I blew up my nose and blew up a tank
then collected the dog tags from the blood soaked soil
(watches from their dead and a dagger or two)
then it hit me, the cold, like a spike in the dawn,
so I put on a German coat of leather and fur
not caring if the owner was dead or alive,
(I had become a monster)
but now I’m old with hands of paper and veins,
when it’s warm in the womb of my den, I hold
the things, I filched from the dead and remember
the flash of the warm Thompson gun:
and I’m cold inside ( will it ever be gone?)
Copyright © Peter Lewis Holmes | Year Posted 2015
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