Rose Mary Boehm

As the Wind Blows
(in Germany during WWII)

She didn’t tell me about her dissent.
Didn’t want to fall foul of the thought police.
And there was the red-faced guy with the cruel, crooked mouth
who owned the house and loved his chickens.
He believed.
'Heil Hitler!'

My first, shy day at school.
‘Heil Hitler’.
We’d brought our blackboards.
My wrinkled old teacher had a desk on a raised platform.
He also had a cane.
Grown-ups had whispered that the young ones
were all at the front.

When it was all over,
Mother hung out a white sheet
from the bedroom window.

When the GIs left,
the Soviets took over.
The new teacher from Belarus taught us Russian.
Bald underneath his huge black fur hat.
His yellow teeth as large as a horse’s when he threw
that unruly boy down the school’s stone steps.

The wheels of tanks looming over me.
My brother made me an airplane from balsawood.
We continued to listen to AFN Europe—
my brother had crafted a crystal radio
from a cigar box.

The Russians didn't change much—
just the street names
and the portraits on the school walls.

Under the Flame Tree

Soft-fingered wisps of green
emerge from many-elbowed branches
topped by red, so red it hurts;
reach out umbrella-like
to give the gift of shade
to those who’ll stay a while.

Flamboyán, Krishnachura, Gulmohar,
Malinche, Tabachine, Poinciana,
flames of glorious beauty
line the tropical street.

I press my back against its double, triple twine,
serene under my royal canopy,
watch passers passing,
urgent and unseeing,
rushing from someplace
to elsewhere.

What she left behind

Notebooks full of annotations
in shorthand. Spiderfeet.
An old Laura Ashley hat,
mauve flowers falling off.
Some larvae eating the straw.
A box with letters written
in Dutch. By hand.
He’d signed 'Willem'. Roaches
must have been nesting
between the pages
and envelopes. I know the disgusting
evidence they leave behind.
Yellow photos with doily-like
edges. People I don’t know
wearing clothes that remind me
of old spy movies. A tiny ’angel
top’ and lace knickers wrapped
in pink silk paper in a pink
box, a pink heart on the lid:
With love. Toni and Wanda.
A necklace made of moon stones.

‘Eccentric’ was what they’d called her
when they were kind. My father’s sister
who’d lived her last years with us.
Whereas once I’d hated her quiet presence
there now was a hole in the fabric
we had woven to make a home.

 

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and eight poetry collections, her work has been widely published in US poetry journals. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/