by Rose Mary Boehm
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| AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
1
The dark shelter had low ceilings, smelled of damp and coal,
and the deafening blasts sent shards of glass and chunks
of walls across the street; we heard that friends had been buried
underneath their homes. The town smelled of rotting flesh.
There were those who resisted. They soon disappeared.
We learned to hold our tongues. Still, my brother and I (pssst)
listened to the AFN, The American Forces Network.
Chattanooga Choo choo.
It was May, the first green shoots promised a rich harvest,
and the GIs, who had parked their planes, jeeps, and tanks
on our fields, moved out, letting the Bolsheviks—as Mum called
those squat, goose-stepping men—move in.
Ochochornia, ‘Dark Eyes’.
They sung, they marched, they raped, they killed.
German girls drowned themselves in the river Elbe rather
than waiting to find out what the soldiers of the Red Army
were capable of.
2
We saw pictures of skeletal beings, eyes deep in dark
sockets, wearing striped ‘pyjamas’. We learned
what the Germans were capable of.
3
Our small family escaped from Stalin’s DDR
and learning Russian to learning English,
to nylon stockings and cigarettes from the PX stores.
To food in our schools, to that rich, brown,
wondrously melting-in-the-mouth thing
called chocolate… And we saw German girls
on the arms of well-fed soldiers
who walked with a swagger.
We learned that everything was better in America.
Films don’t lie. Everything was big in America: the houses,
the fridges, the cars, the plates heaped with food, the cows.
And they were free (so they said); the women were pretty
and wore deep-red lipstick, the men were handsome
and rich. And America was powerful and ruled the world.
Wherever they didn’t like something, they would
bomb the place and kill everyone to make peace.
We learned about it all in school.
And we believed.
America shone, and beckoned, seduced, and promised.
Now we could see it on TV, our newspapers were full of stories,
our friends would emigrate, sending long letters
full of tales of hardship and breathtaking achievement.
Temptress America, counterweight America, example
America, the American dream we all shared. Day-by-day,
week-by-week, month-by-month, year-by-year we began to comprehend
the fullness of your imperfections and your vulnerabilities.
Now here you are, shiny people without our experience of the worst
that humankind can do. You blindly stepped right into it.
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was several times nominated for a Pushcart and Best of Net. Her eighth book, Life Stuff, has been published by Kelsay Books (November 2023). A new MS is in the works.
