Everywhere your enemies celebrate too early.
They took away your name from the city,
but it will always be remembered
for the battle of Stalingrad.
It was what you were named for-steel.
From such a metaphor, we can learn about endurance
even in the darkest days.
Death is the ultimate victor.
But living a life that shuns bourgeois vulgarity
and stamps its force
like a sword forged from hot steel
that strikes at the heart of mortality,
speaks with its own power.
How can there be loneliness
when one is struggling for bread and land with others
as the crane who knows when to fly
in the yearly migration
on the edge of the curve of the great earth?
It is victory
to win a people’s war.
I will never forget when I first saw
Stalin’s immortal chiseled face,
a Spartan
out of the pages of Thucydides’ magnum opus,
a battle cry for the ages.
