Fire Classification

The philosophers left first: Marx, Hobbes, Descartes,
Schopenhauer,
finally Montaigne too: Autumn/Winter One, Sarajevo.
Then it was the turn of the novelists: Dumas, Dickens, Gogol.
The last was Shalamov to waste away in the stove
with his tales of the Kolimah, Autumn/Winter Two.
That year, until May, words suffered hell to
provide calories.

In the third year of the siege, the theater's bookcase burned,
first Brecht, then indiscriminately Strindberg, Shakespeare,
Racine,
finally, with tears in his eyes, even Chekhov.
The fourth year was the turn of poetry,
but the war ended and spared them.
Fire classification: poetry was destined last,
in war, the most urgent.