Charge of the Tank Brigade
Ours is not to reason why
Ours is but to amplify
I.
Half a league, those Nazi Pigs!
Half a league onward
All in the Valley of Death
Rode some odd two hundred.
“Forward the Tank Brigade!
Stop the Jew-Nazi comic’s genocide!”
Into Ukrainian Death
Rode the lost two hundred.
II.
“Forward, the Tank Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs was not to make reply
Theirs was not to reason why
Theirs was but to amplify
Toward a Ukrainian Death
Rode the two hundred.
III.
Putin to the right of them
Donald to the left of them
Carlson to the front of them
Volleyed and blundered
Stormed at with tweet and shell
(Yet somehow, Ukrainians held…and held)
Into the jaws of hell
Advanced the two hundred.
IV.
Flashed all their turrets bare
Flashy javelins flew through air
Spearing tanks sitting there
Charging grandmothers spitting
Deadly sunflower seeds
(all the world wondered)
Plunged in artillery smoke
Theaters, stations, hospitals broke
And brutal babies, they eviscerated
By the brave two hundred.
5
Donald to the right of them
Putin to the left of them
Carlson behind them
Volleyed and wondered
How long might this wall
of pageant queens and comedians
Delay the mighty two hundred?
6
When can such glory fade
O that wild charge they made!
(will someone bury the children?)
Honorless charge they made
The honor-less Tank Brigade
May they furlough their Putinous prison.
The initial invasion of Ukraine involved about 200,000 Russian troops (in my poem, “the two hundred”), and a pretty massive number of tank squadrons. Some estimates of deaths so far suggest at least 15,000 Russian soldiers. Many of their bodies may have been left behind in Ukraine.
When Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” he was writing about the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War (1853–1856). Crimea is part of Ukraine. Russia annexed much of it in 2014.
In the 21st century, I read “The Charge of the Light Brigade” with a bitterly sarcastic critique. Glamorizing ‘brave’ martial misadventures in Ukraine in the 1850s occurred alongside too many other incidents where the British were the ones pointing the cannons and machine guns at all the ‘other peoples’ they came to subjugate. “Ours is not to reason why”??? For fuck’s sake, NO you silly nits!
Perhaps if Florence Nightingale had been a poet, rather than a statistician/ nurse, someone might have called attention to the incredible price such imperial arrogance inflicts on both the soldiers pointing those guns at the people they colonize, and the far greater number of victims of colonization.
My poem slips in and out of a Russian tank commander’s vantage. “Those Nazi Pigs” and other propaganda probably percolate among military cadres as ‘the official story,’ but professional soldiers probably take such things with a grain of salt. They acquiesce in such lies, because failure to do otherwise could result in consequences that wind up killing some of their troops, or costing career advancement, or whatever other motivations apply. Is it absurd that President Zelensky, a Jewish president, somehow reflects a ‘Nazi regime’? Absolutely. Yet people will shut down their reason, rather than engage with such absurdity. And the more such absurdities are questioned, critiqued, and challenged, the more they are amplified and actually ‘believed’ by some people.
Advertising is insidious, no?
To win in Ukraine, the key will not be killing as many Russians as possible, but discovering ways to stop amplifying the monsters, to convince people to ‘reason why.’ That applies in America as well. Our monsters here are also full of ‘passionate intensity’ — they will scream and shout and appear ‘strong’ as a result. We had best start wondering why, and finding ways not to amplify.
For now, my way to try to connect to thoughts beyond the obvious is something of a game. In the spirit of Nabokov: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”
