Kulaks

This poem is written in response to an event that took place in Stalin's Russia in the 1930s... farmers known as Kulaks were better-off under Lenin's New Economic Policy, and attempted to keep their grain or destroy it so that the government could not buy it at a lower price than it was worth. What resulted was extreme tragedy, ranging from exile to Siberia to brutal death for many of the Kulaks. Anyways, here's the poem.

Misshapen toes,
matching shabby clothes
poor folks' cloaked
by incessant regimes
harbingers of a fallen empire
filled with shadows of men
now too sad to grieve.

Mommy's alright
but Daddy's not
he worked the fields today,
driven to complain
about unfair wages
rights denied!
now Daddy'll sleep tonight
but he won't wake tomorrow.

Daddy finds himself on a train
headed for that frozen plain
Crying out, he is pushed out of the car.

Whatever happened to decent men?
Police are killing without repent
and Kulaks disappear.