Engines of war move inexorably toward certain houses

Morning News:

Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen?

Whose memory will frame the photograph

and use the memory for what it was

 

never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was

caught on a ball field, near a window: war,

exhorted through the grief a photograph

revives. (Or was the team a covert branch

of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen,

a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?)

What did the old men pray for in their houses

 

of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses

between blackouts and blasts, when each word was

flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread,

both hostage to the happenstance of war?

Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen.

Outside the window, black strokes on a graph

of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches.

 

“This letter curves, this one spreads its branches

like friends holding hands outside their houses.”

Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was

there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph

still gather children in the teacher’s kitchen?

Are they there meticulously learning war-

time lessons with the signs for house, book, bread?

Marilyn Hacker.