Kapuśniak
— we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
— Ilya Kaminsky
First, cleave the wilted globe
of head cabbage in half,
then shred everything
into a brine of sour kraut
with a fatted pork bone
and a fist full of barley.
Next, stir a slurry of white
flour into the sautéed onions
to thicken the steaming pot
already at its boiling
point. It will discharge,
unapologetically, an odor
that will skulk up the stairwell
and down a quiet hall
breaching, room by room,
the unwary house.
It may appear gradually
at first, familiar, even benign —
not unlike the slow boiling
of a frog, or it may arrive
sudden as an assault
to the senses, vulgar
as a slur blurted out
from the puckered mouth
of a politician then echoed
by crowds behind the sawhorse
barricades of a police line.
Let the smell remind us
that we’re not that far
from the deep belch
and thunder of tanks
convoyed-up and burning
through a heavy cloud
of gun powder and diesel
in a snowbound
pine forest in Poland.
Let the smell remind us,
that we’re not that far
from the vegetal musk
lifting from a Soviet
soldier’s trench-footed
leather boots
as The Red Army
slogged westward
past the Pinsk Marshlands
toward Warsaw.
Let the smell remind us,
that cabbage soup,
like history, repeats itself
and that we’re never that far
from the putsch
in Washington D.C.
or Kyiv or the beer halls
in Munich, where
the National Workers’ Party
ignited, like that,
into Brownshirts who
kicked-in unlocked doors
behind which, innocent families
broke only the heels
from their black bread
to better sop kapuśniak’s
holy broth up.