Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I dreamt that I was on my cousin's farm in Lincolnshire, but it looked more as it did when my uncle was alive. I was standing, with some of my cousins, between the old outhouses, which were used for keeping livestock, before it became entirely arable, and a prairie farm. My cousins were rolling out parchments, with roll call and insignia, from the Second World War. Although they were my cousins, and the same age as me, I knew in my dream that they had fought in the war and that these were their own documents. I said that I was an afterthought to that war, and they glared at me.

That must be how it seemed to me as a child whose parents lived through the war: that I/we were an after thought, thought after the occasion, the time when. The time when all the original plans were changed. And that everything I said, or prattled, could not be taken seriously, because I was not part of that experience.

I had that dream when I was circling around my mother's account of her war experiences in Java. It too is an afterthought, written so long after the war that her thoughts have almost hardened into cliché.

A plain brown envelope with the title Camp Experiences underlined two or three times and below that 1943-1945. I asked her to write this memoir, I think, but I don't clearly remember now. She sat at the dining table to write it, where she also wrote her letters. It isn't dated, but she alludes to the date at the end, when she writes of her marriage on 20th February, 51 years ago; so it was probably in February 1997, a month before she died, unexpectedly.

The account is hand-written on small letter writing paper, and only the handwriting seems intensely alive. The rounded even hand, opposed to my own which is elliptical: an even and consistent character, her Libra.

I wish I had recorded her voice, and prompted her to say more, and differently. I remember she told me about cooking rice, in a big pot, outside in the compound. The Japanese guards said that they couldn't cook in the huts because of the fire danger, well that's what the guards said. They cooked it on a stove which used wood which has been burnt, charcoal, and they had to fan the flames. I asked her if it tasted good. Oh yes, yes, when we were allowed to eat. Sometimes there was a thunderstorm and that was really bad, we had to cover everything and run for our lives.

When something is remembered later in the text she will write it in and then place an asterisk at the relevant point. She does not attempt to rewrite her afterthoughts in the correct order. This must do, as there are other tasks to attend to. This is enough.

Rolling out
Rolling out old documents, like parchment scrolls—though that isn't true either of her memoirs or of the family letters. The latter have to be unfolded from the decorative box in which they were kept.

There are only two headings, both underlined, Christmas 1942 and August 1945.

Christmas 1942: the first women and children under 16 are herded into concentration camps.

Perhaps I find her account hard to read because most of the sentences are captive and passive, subjects driven by acts of violence and the possibility of rape.

The first contingent * arrived (*of Japs) on the 1st of March 1942. I was in town when they came marching in at a brisk pace. There were only about 50 of them, but nobody moved and we all stared at what seemed brazen cheek and fatalistic courage.
We soon were told not to hang underwear on the washing line or show ourselves out on the roads more than was highly necessary....
Brothels sprang up like toadstools, including in a house lower down the road which had once been our home!

do not hang on
wear under
go under to wear
wear what

do not show yourself
out on the road
out on the line
more than is highly
necessary
this is a message
of high importance

look at the toadstools
toads spring off
and take
after the line

These people, at the beginning of the occupation, will be taken as captives and made into toads, like their captors. They do not resemble HD's London frogs in "May 1943", which are merely banal and rather harmless:

Frog faces,
frog lust,
frog bellies
in the dust,
till unexpected flame
gave you another name (XI)

It seems that they will have no chance of turning into 'salamanders in the flame'. At best they could be geckos.

There are no more similes.

There is always the threat of physical violence. Controlling the body is the first rule. Stand to attention, bow, straighten up, and dismissed.

Yet there are moments of release and even of something like choice, though only for the young and strong.

All through our time in camp, the younger women had to do nightshifts of 2 hours at a time, going in pairs and often, after the hardships of the day, to sit on a low wall under a star lit sky was heaven.

until there is
a constellation
of movements

a holding pattern
not quite landing
not quite arriving

During the final days, having volunteered to work on the land, the hardest job, my mother describes her "breathlessness":

So long as we weren't caught sitting down on the job we were left in peace. I suffered badly from breathlessness and that has been with me ever since, when I am under pressure.

She had difficulty breathing when she was dying, but thought it was just pressure. This is too compressed.

breath
less
ness
has been with me
has stayed with me
stay with me
now
I cannot get
her breath

stammer
simple speech
statis
are stat
are stet

nothing to breathe
at this pressure
pauses
that no one notices
not breathing
but standing
still

breath
less
peace

Afterthoughts
"Everything is an afterthought in a dream, and bears a very oblique relationship to the emotions which inspired it."

Nachdenken is not afterthought: it's think, reflect, muse, ponder.

Nachdichtung is an adaptation, free version or rendering.

Afterthought is Nachtraglicher Einfall.

Nachtrag is a supplement, addendum or appendix; a codicil to a last will; an addenda to a book.

Nachtragen is to add, append, or post up in a book; book (omitted items).

Additional, supplementary, subsequent, belated.

Epimetheus, she said, without hesitation.
I was She-who-thinks-after, sister of Prometheus, She-
who-thinks-before.