bombs/birdsong

There is country and there is country. 

The country is under threat.

                The country is a safe place.

I write this in transit,

   -packaged up and labelled with my parent’s name,

collared with my own,-

to a field in the safe country. 

The length of the platform is filled with cries I know. 

   Statements that don’t start with possibility. 

When you hear the Luftwaffe, run. 

When the noises originate from no other place 

than from heaven’s guts, 

get to a safe place.

A safer place than the safe country.

A safer place than the safe country?

Safety appears to be an abstract concept.

Our chase for safety begins on a train. 

Propellers chase the war,

and stop to gun down the children, so-

I do not understand where they think they are sending us.

This is a happy poem,

so I’ll tell you what I tell the children.

There will be a day we all cease running for land and politics.

I am awaken by one that has never seen the safe country,

taken by the green

   that has escaped the city. We have followed tracks to common ground.

The sky here is an extraordinary blue,

   but confused by the epicentre of invasion.

The planes pierce the skies before they go for the buildings.

   The clouds have been whisked up

and reinstated in one thin curdled sheet. 

   I, myself, have upset my inkwell as I slept,

pumping along an iron sliver,

beneath the squabble of country and country.

Black streaks drip in pattern from the sky.

They are conscious of their distance,

   we are all so terribly conscious of industrial dangers.

This is a happy poem.

These are not descents that terrify us.

They are visitors from our city picture books

   and this is spring in wartime: when 

the undergrowth wakes the hedgerows, and 

the hedgerows pin pale blossom on the trees, and

the real inhabitants of the safe country upset my inkwell-

and become the contradiction.

The only wings welcome in the safe country.

Not everything airborne is our enemy 

as they would have us believe.

This is a happy poem.

There are still birds hustling in the safe country.

There is fact and there is fiction. 

     Fact is the reason we’re sent straight to bed

after supper, and a reason supper was had before the evening news.

Fiction is easier to consume. I opened Hansel & Gretel when I could still hear the headlines.

The fact they stole our peace

might permit me to forage in their folklore

for signs that a country

cannot truly be as horrid as they say.

This is a happy poem.

Most have faith in a path home, 

in scrappage or sweet.

The shepherd has a way home,

   a trodden valley in the grass of flagpole blades.

Smears of sheeps’ coats tugged from the travelling flock 

wave coolly to the dripping sky.

   The fibre twists are too scarce for selfish braiding and weaving,

but abundant for flapping homemakers, teasing the fleece

with their beaks for a nest.

   What a rarity now, is the will to preserve a home.

This is a happy poem,

   because the safe country is left to animals.

They don’t chatter like the savages, 

about the uncertainty of tomorrow.

I have learnt a lot from evacuation:

there are exploded shells hours from eggshells. 

There are lost sons hours from sunlight.

Wartime exists in springtime. 

There are wars and words, fact and fiction. 

There are bombs, and there is birdsong.

There is country, and there is country, and

this is a happy poem, if that is what you see.

© Mollie Mardel