THE SURVIVOR
(Dresden, 1945--Baltimore, 2000)
She saw on her home street
a host of Judgment soldiers
plunder everything,
crack shock troops of total war,
each one a six-foot flame.
Momma, that was many years ago.
It's as if she hears angels
confined to the head of a match
scream in pain as it ignites: among them
her parents and their youngest child.
Her family fled to the cellar:
she ran outside, terrorized
by an army of flames,
running without looking back
until she reached Baltimore.
She never talked about it
until one day in her old age
the low drone of a jet became
a flock of bombers: she ran outside,
fleeing the flame of her stove.
Our house is on fire, our house is on fire...
Come, this will put the fire out,
I tell her; a Sisyphean task,
trying to drown out the fires of hell
with spoonfuls of nursing-home Jell-O.
