The Gulag Archipelago (1918-2003)

‘What else is the head of Papa good for?’

(Zoya Leshcheva admits to defecating in a severed monumental head of Josef Stalin)

Though I forget

the Russian names and all the details

one picture vividly remains

innocent women (as though that mattered)

still in the summer silk the cotton dresses of arrest

pulled frozen trees down beneath the Arctic circle

to make tools and wheel-barrows

with which they then dug

the useless White Sea and Baltic Canal

A quarter of a million souls here alone were mortified

their flesh grated like soft cheddar cheese

relentlessly their cheeks were pressed on jagged tin

and after removal of the summer dresses they were murdered in

thrown onto sledges frozen

their last sound a dull clonk

Fish bones and black chaff

fed the torment not the prisoner

all of this forgotten

were it not for Solzhenitsyn Alexander

Sixty Million people he counted murdered

in our time on our watch

countless more survived

countless millions more besides

in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s testament

sixty million souls in this evil torment died

Evil does exist and knows itself

it took a huge administration

to undress and grate this cheese

the brutal truth we see and read and know its foul remains

still pounding and slitting perishing souls

the evil in us all can passively this endless killing more beget