We call them Winston, Franklin and Joseph
in our heads, now that we know them, imagine
Roosevelt in his wheelchair, smell Churchill
smoking a cigar in the bathtub as John Lithgow
did in The Crown but maybe Stalin portrayed
by Robert Duvall is harder to imagine but easier
to hate: the massacre at Katyn, for example,
where Catherine Grace Katz writes convincingly
about Russian atrocities, murdering all those Polish
officers and aristocrats, shooting them in the back
of the head, then removing letters, from their pockets,
replacing them with others to indicate deceptively
that Nazis killed the Poles, Stalin’s creepy doodles
depicting his state of mind at Yalta and elsewhere;
I read it all with a magnifying glass due to
my macular degeneration but I can see it. I see it all
in my mind now: Joseph’s moustache,
Franklin’s granny glasses and smoke rising
from Winston’s cigar.
Jan Ball has published 396 poems in the U.S. and internationally. Finishing Line Press has published her four chapbooks and first full-length poetry collection. Jan has been nominated twice for the Pushcart and twice for Best of the Net.