April 15, 2016/May 1, 2016 The remembered village had stone houses on a sloping cobbled street where she fetched milk in a pail past the field where later he strode manly in wool pants suspenders over a white shirt rolled sleeves of a workman and she was smitten Nevermind that in the picture the house was a brick rowhouse, where all in a row she was born, then me in the same bed filling the front bedroom the other rooms unknown Understandable confusion she might be my twin elder twin yet in those twenty years so little had changed save the great cataclysm of the twentieth century, if you hadn’t been there as I had not Twenty years in that same bed same house and street same Anglo-Saxon villagers with their cats and dogs and the fateful pub and the pram at the bottom of the garden Yet some of the boys had gone to the Panzers and screaming fighters the dull drone of bombers the smell of damp wool and gunpowder and not come back Backlit by the gray English sky he’d strode across that field just like in the picture show I can’t even say where never having been there I’ll always be there crushed by the Reich in lice-ridden trenches, barefoot in the shimmering jungle dreaming of his mother.
Martin Ahrens 