5 Poems 5 Days -- Day 2

I've been writing poems for about 37 years now.  I started when I was in grad school working on my Ph.D.  It was a hot, humid August afternoon, and I was sitting at a desk thinking about Faulkner, trying to make sense of a line of imagery that seemed to thread through all of his novels.

I wasn't having any luck.

Out of nowhere, I had this sense of my parents and where they were and what they were doing.  It came as a shock this sense.  I hadn't  lived at home in almost a decade, seldom saw my parents, tried in fact not to think about them and their lives.  I didn't want to know about their worries, their memories of WWII and the mess those memories were making of their lives.   But suddenly there they were in my head, and for some reason I started writing about them.

I hadn't written a poem in at least a decade either, but there suddenly I was writing a poem. And it wasn't the last. This poem about my parents started me writing poems again, and I've never stopped.

Here's the poem:

Dreams of Poland, September l939

Too many fears

for a summer day

I regulate my thoughts

and my breathing

regard the humidity

and dream

Somewhere my parents

are still survivors

living unhurried lives

of unhurried memories:

the unclean sweep of a bayonet

through a young girl's breast,

a body drooping over a rail fence,

the charred lips of the captain of lancers

whispering and steaming

"Where are the horses

where are the horses?"

Death in Poland

like death nowhere else‑‑

cool, gray, breathless

__________________

The poem appeared in Lightning and Ashes.