Reverie on Liberation Day

© Photo by Jon Godfrey

Sheltered in my cocoon of peace,
I'm haunted by the dead unfreed.
On my map of Germany, all roads lead to Ruhla,
where my father worked his war.

Some lives are excavations backwards.
As time begins its slow erosion,
deep in my maps I search for him,
waiting for us to reach the same frame.

Some nights, when windows rattle a homage to a rising sea,
when lights stay on to keep the ghosts at bay,
I think that I hear him appear, late and drunk again,
a conjuror bringing no rabbit from the gin.

The memories are sealed and filed,
then a dozen photos smile;
a terrible kinship is born,
from a hollow cheek or a shade of eye.

This is my father at twenty-two,
released from the war camp, looking ahead.
Look at me here now, at thirty-six,
in this communion with the dead.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem came first in the Jersey Evening Post Writing Competition of 1995 when the theme was Liberation, marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Jersey from German occupation.)

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