William Heyen
Ghosts
Just once she allowed me
glances through a tin of papers
kept beneath shoes in her closet.
I saw an order signed by Himmler,
memos from the Ministry of Propaganda,
records of her Aryan ancestry
back to the eighteenth century....
I don’t know what else I saw.
After her death, the papers vanished,
probably burned by her widower,
American soldier who married her
four years after the death of her husband,
prisoner-of-war in Russia.
I picture him incinerating papers
one by one in a pot-bellied stove
in that rural kitchen.
Who is alive, & who is dead?
I married a German daughter.
A soldier opens the grate,
removes papers from this tin &,
one by one, thrusts them in.
Page(s) 28
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