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My Mother Remembers
Clothes
Can
tell me, fifty years later, what she wore
(burgundy
velvet, floor length black cape) the night
she
met Goebbels, reached up to open a door
because
she was taller. Knows the exact cut
of
that pale yellow chiffon (on the bias)
made
for the garden party where she forgot
her
long gloves and was forced to borrow. Still sees
the
silken swirl of pink at her knees, the day
she
could have dropped those geraniums (she says)
right
onto Hitler's head from a balcony,
just
a week before the ambassador found
my
father, the two of them on holiday
(
Lake
Constanz
),
warned, "keep going." Leather
bound
books,
Queen Anne chairs, Georgian silver, those bright
silks,
velvets, chiffons, everything left behind
in
the British Embassy, to be bombed late
one
night, when the Royal Air Force did their best
to
level that part of
Berlin. Today we sit
in
her garden—she holds her hands wrist to wrist
to
show the fit, the curve of her slender waist.
— Published in Common Ground |
