WAR Poem: LENINGRAD METRONOME, by Peter A. Prizel

Tick–Tick–Tick

Ticking slowly means all clear–Quick ticks are an incoming air raid.
I was lifeless on the stairway to my flat. The domes of
St. Isaac’s could not raise my spirits. It took a screaming
Stuka dive bomber to rouse me. I could not wake
my companions.
Their dead frozen fingers stick straight up on upturned
palms supplicating an angry god who took their conscious with
out their knowledge.

Tick–Tick–Tick

I’m alive now. My heart races. Its beating matches the metronome.
Only last night it was used in The Leningrad Orchestra. Last night
the bassoonist died, collapsed from starvation. His last breath was into
the reed. It made a somber note over the sad city. The thawing icicles
cried outside, mourners for one one-thousandth of the departed of
that day.

Tick-Tick–Tick

I run under a bridge that spans the Neva. Old women collect
water through a hole. A woman jumped in here yesterday, took
her own life rather than eat her dead children to subsist. I think
God will understand, when he comes back into our lives–
If he returns. If we are still here.
The bombs rain down. The saints atop the cathedral watch
motionless giving their benediction to the destruction.
Windows shatter. Even the bodies of the Tsars shake
in their tombs on Hare Island. There will be none for
the victims. No regal marble headstone or even a plain
marker. Just a common mass nameless gaping hole.
A grave which the bomb helped make.

Tick-Tick-Tick

All clear. My mind is free to go numb–My
heart matches the metronome. I do not live.
I exist.