Poetry from the Eastern Front.

BEFORE ATTACK

When soldiers go to death they sing,
but just before it
                          one may cry.
In battle, the most fearful thing
is when you know you soon may die.
The snow's ploughed up with mortar shells
no longer white, but black with dust.
Whizz - goes one,
                      and a friend lies dead,
and I'm alive - death's hurtled past.
Next turn is mine -
                            so beastly near.
It's me they're aiming at, I know.
It's 41,
          the grimmest year
infantry frozen in the snow.
A magnet's what I seem to be
Attracting every shell that flies.
But once again death misses me -
a blast,
           and my lieutenant dies...
But now we've grown too tense to wait
And crouching, out of trenches get,
driven along by icy hate
that goads us like a bayonet.

It wasn't long, the skirmish.
                                  Then
we swilled cold vodkas, lashed by gales
and scraped the blood of other men,
unruffled,
               from beneath our nails.

- Semyon Gudzenko
   (1942)
  translated by Dorian Rottenberg
(from Immortality - Verse by Soviet Poets who laid down their lives in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945)


Another translation of the poem available here.