Sean Lynch: 3 Poems
A Distant Hill
Humans lined up for the kill
quaking before a trench
a preparation for innocents slaughtered
a trench dug by convicts trusted
more than innocents slaughtered.
The Urals are impassable.
Comrade, there's no need
to justify when you have vodka
and your pick of the floor cleaners
to fuck, with genitals only a little warmer
than their hardened knees.
Comrade Stalin himself says a soldier
who has crossed thousands of kilometers
through blood and fire and death
can have fun with a woman.
The Urals are impassable.
Comrade, why have a conscience
when there's the commissar
to give reasons? Confessions
excesses of humans, the Siberian forests
hold unknowable numbers, quotas
of timber and quotas of corpses
fill the hills surrounding the gulag
but there's one hill that's different
where numbers become bodies
and bodies become numbers
and humans collapse into holes
like they never existed.
The Urals are impassable.
The glades of Tambov woods
and the Meschchera nature reserve
are islands of nihilism scattered
across a sea of meaning.
Camps large enough to hold the millions
of reasons we fear monuments
for the forgotten. The state monopolizes
monuments. Auntie Pasha do not resell
the stockings you found in Chelyabinsk.
Don't you dare travel to Zlatoust to hawk
your wares. It doesn't matter
if your boys starve.
The Urals are impassable.
You'll only end up a floor cleaner.
One son dead on the front
another son maimed at home.
The Urals are impassable.
How one man can destroy
the lives of millions
and ruin an ideology.
Like they never existed.
All buried on the distant hill
that only the executioner
with his stone soul can reach.
A distant hill filled with nothing.
Blood Stained Plains
Driven from stone-walled
and thatched-roof hovels by the redcoats
with bayonet, but mostly by hunger
over the Atlantic
halfway across the world
by way of decaying wood
in broken vessels devastated by disease.
Killed before arrival by infections
and overcrowding and even more hunger.
Harassed in colonial cities
of New York, Boston, Philadelphia
by "Nativists" who formed mobs
to assault foreigners. Some fled west again
as settlers mimicking tactics conceived
by oppressors in the homeland
the punctured emerald isle.
Pushing farther west
in this new red land
to escape prejudice
by earlier conquerors
in the cramped suffocation
of east coast cities
to vast prairies
stained with blood.
The colonized transmogrified into colonizer
to nurture the ashen earth.
Bonus Army
Remember MacArthur's charge
against broke WW1 vets
camped out in protest in DC
at the height of the Great Depression?
Remember cavalry and tanks
running down old men
and women and children
on the lawn of the Capitol building?
The original Occupy movement
demanded due money
and was met with force
of the active duty
ordered to drive out
veteran soldiers.
Burn the Tents!
Snatch the rifles!
Fire and tear gas and gunshots.
A scene that will be repeated
in the future.
The Great Depression
will return.
And it will be the end
of the American Empire.
Sean Lynch is a leftist poet and editor who lives in South Philly. His poems have been published in various journals and he is the author of four chapbooks, the latest being On Violence, published in 2019 by Radical Paper Press. You can find out more about him on swlynch.com