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Mistakes

Matthew Boyle

The Battle of Stalingrad is considered the bloodiest battle in recorded history.

The Axis powers never fully recovered from the defeat.

                        —Encyclopedia Britannica

The bullet hits the soldier’s chest,

knocks him to the dusty street.

Outside the crumbling church of St. Dimitry,

he hears Babooshka

reading Anna Karenina

on the way back

from Sunday mass.

“Guard Mother Russia well,” 

she warns the little boy.

He would die ten thousand times

to liberate Tsaritsyn.

The poster of Stalin

fades from the pile of bricks across the road.

He smiles and shuts his eyes,

sees his first love

and the Kadrill festival of 1917.

Those women in flower-pattern shawls

bow to men in capes.

They stare into each other’s eyes

with the passion known to forbidden lovers.

The men caress their partners’ necks,

dip them to the cobblestone.

The women leap out of reach,

turn and beg the men to come.

They spin, spin until their red dresses

rise up to resemble the steeple bells

that shout the immortality of the white night. 

The soldier turns to that beautiful girl,

kisses her

until the square disappears

behind the alabaster church.

The stained-glass saints glare back at him,

whisper of the bomb he placed

beneath his father’s alter

amidst the chaos of that fiery October.

MATTHEW BOYLE, 2011, is studying Sociology, Management Studies, and English. His favorite poems include W.B. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.”