1945


In the war, you could choose between
Levels of evil, as if hell had its own dark ranks:
Mussolini made the trains run on time;
Hitler made the trains run over you on time.

But what do I know? I was born
The year the war ended, German by name, Sicilian by blood.
My father was 4-F with a busted eardrum;
My mother wore her hair up in a baker's loaf.

I had no uncles to bring me back a bayonet
Or a bad cough picked up in Paris from brandy and Gauloises.
The year I was born, there was kissing in the streets
And a crippled president dead in a pinetree cottage.

I've seen the pictures: Il Duce hanging by his heels;
The Fuehrer barking down his generals at the map table;
Ike in his tight jacket and the smile of a village simpleton.
I've seen the skulls stare out behind the wire fences.

No matter what Marx said, history does not repeat itself as farce—
It moves from tragedy to tragedy, and it has no end,
Only intermissions for the gin and the dancing girls,
For the axe that falls between the acts.

Cramped in my mother's womb, I might have been
A sailor on a U-boat, listening for the slow approach
Of the last torpedo, the waters trembling around me.
I might have been crouched in a foxhole, as rain rose to my neck.

Could I feel the Axis in my veins, the old Europe
That turned to mud under the boots and the heavy wheels?
What did I know about bodies and burned cathedrals?
I came out bawling, the only human thing to do.

from Pelican Tracks (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).