My nom de guerre, so the Germans
wouldn’t discover my real name
and murder my family; alas it didn’t work:
dear Mama, gentle Papa, and little Gabriel
slaughtered at that abattoir, Auschwitz.
Besides, no greater hero than Leonidas:
his 300 Spartans held off the Persian army
so Greece could survive, even if he
and his men knew they’d die at Thermopylae:
unlike those bastard-coward Nazis
who all surrendered at war’s end
Up to me, a bullet to each of their skulls,
like they did to any village that hid us,
when, to coordinate our strikes, I’d run
gossamer telegraph wires through trees,
like the decorations Christians string
to celebrate their Jesus’ birth.
Yes, the war’s over, and we’re all supposed
to get along, but Communists and Fascists
still butcher each other in the streets,
and my family’s all gone, the hole they left
wider than the ones Panzer tanks
blasted into farm house walls.
Time to leave for America and a new life,
to become a merchant, like my poor father:
and not a god of war who made the Nazis
shit themselves when we’d swoop down
from the mountains, to strike and taunt
and vanish, like Odysseus, when he saved
himself and his men from that giant idiot.
