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      June 12, 2020What I Remember of World War IIDan Gerber

      I was born the day before the first
      air raid on Briton and, of course, remember
      nothing of that. But I remember
      everything that was spoken about
      the war and the way people looked
      when they spoke about it. I remember
      the German prisoner-of-war camp in
      our little town, only a few blocks
      from our house, remember from the
      black and white newsreel film, the
      Nazi Stuka dive bombers, screaming
      through sirens fixed on their wings
      to make their deadly terror even
      more terrible to those about to die
      and to those who remembered the
      terrified dying, and the scars, if only
      in the memories of those telling it and
      the names from the radio and the
      ink-soaked names on the front
      pages of the newspapers I picked up
      from the sidewalk—Al Alamein,
      Corregidor, Saipan, Tarawa, Bastogne,
      Buchenwald, Guadalcanal, Dresden, Iwo
      Jima, The Bulge, Hiroshima, Dunkirk,
      remember the young men in khaki
      who came to our house to see my sister,
      the off-duty guards from the prison camp
      who came to drink and play pinochle
      with my mother and Martha, my nanny—
      my father away in Washington for the war—
      the jokes and laughter through
      the haze of Camels and Lucky Strikes,
      and the blue stars in the windows of
      families with fathers, husbands, and sons
      away in the war and two of those stars
      turning gold for Mrs. Jackson across
      the street whose husband’s destroyer went down
      in the Coral Sea, and Mrs. Keller, catty-
      corner to our house, whose son Jack
      burned up in the sky over Dresden,
      the fox holes I dug in the sand at
      our cottage where I waited for the Jap
      ships to loom up on the far Lake Michigan
      horizon, remember the piercing blue
      of the morning glories against the
      whitewashed fence out our kitchen
      door where I stood when I heard
      on the radio of a great bomb
      dropped on Japan, and a few days
      later, when my mother gave me the
      key to open a neighbor’s cottage for
      two men delivering a mattress and
      how the one walking backwards as
      he carried the front end of it said,
      “Hey kid, did you hear, the war’s
      over?” And I ran back up the long drive,
      the road so much longer and the
      gravel deeper, running home to
      tell my mom that now everything
      would be all right, forever.

      from #67 - Spring 2020

      Dan Gerber

      “When I was twelve years old, miserable and lonely, living away from home in a place I didn’t want to be, I read a poem—Walter De La Mare’s ‘The Listeners’—that filled me with mystery and, for a while, took me beyond my wretched little self and saved me with the idea that I might make something out of words that could create, in myself at least, the feeling and the vision I’d received from that poem. Poetry made me want to go on living back then, and it still does.”

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