A little less surrounded by death
The air shudders pregnant with shrieking
metal and the reek of smokeless
powder as Juergen and Vanya fail to kill
each other, mesmerized together
by the vision of a sunflower
poking petals through the rubble
of a fire-blackened library in Kiev,
1943, slats of ochre light
illumining its charred rafters
from the west. Each never finds
out the other’s name, though
they remember the moment
on their deathbeds seventy
years later, in Erfurt, and
Voronezh.