October 1, 1939 / Port Of Hamburg

[October 1 1939]

We are travelling

Through a flat beautiful landscape

Writes my grandmother

Ancient forests

Trees like bewitched figures thickets of shrubs

In 1939

Farmlands small wooden houses

Blue lakes green village ponds

Her father arrested then released

Now and then cattle

Earth covered with high grasses

Fake passports

Enchanting places where one

Would like to stop

A steamship from Hamburg to Havana

Now a small wooden church

Now a village train depot

Six months on an island

I wish

Then New Orleans

I wish I could

Then a train to Los Angeles

I wish I could describe

Where she keeps a diary

I wish

Which I read on a different train

I wish I could describe each place to you

Almost eighty years to the day

[Port of Hamburg]

After school

They chant her name

She runs home

She prays

But caught because her father

Couldn’t quite believe

What ought to’ve been plain to see

‘till broken glass was at their feet

And now they could not wait

Some clothes and letters in a crate

Left the cat and drove away

Steamship

Wool sky

All seasick

The tide

She held her breath until

At last they’d got across

But they weren’t allowed to dock

All because the country didn’t want

To let those people through

Ain’t that a familiar tune?

I have to sing it back to you

History don’t have a chance

Drowning in the false fat present tense

And why would you need

To know anything

That happened any earlier

Than late last week?

Lucky one

She got in

Some papers signed

By distant kin

And every night she wrote

Six postcards sent back home

And when she read the brief replies

My grandmother would start to cry

The careful script it could not hide

The fear in every one

She read beneath the LA Sun

Until the letters did not come

History don’t have a chance

Drowning in the force-fed present tense

Why would you need

To know anything

That happened any earlier

Than late last week?

Than late last week?

Than late last week?