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MOUNTAINSIDE
                    
Always, there would be darkness hovering through-
out the bushes and trees, massive sky and earthen ground 
he tiptoed upon in shoeless stealth, machine gun slung 

over one shoulder and, strapped across the other, 
a leather pouch holding coded messages he delivered 
encampment to encampment, their locations razor-sharp 

in his 11 year old brain, in a body tall enough to be 
mistaken for older. Tall enough to be made a Partisan — 
a courier, and down the road, likely qualifying as 

a full-blown saboteur targeting Germans and the war 
machinery they were transporting through Yugoslavia’s 
Mosor mountain villages. 

(German soldiers, who, if they’d caught him, a Jew, 
& partisan, to boot, would surely have beaten him 
to death extracting every bit of information they could.)

Upon each return to his farmhouse refuge, the 
communications he’d been charged with having been 
delivered hours before and miles away, 

the fear he’d braved began melting away. And, 
in the moments it took him to hang up his courier bag
and machine gun, he felt ready for the evening meal

of pit-roasted mutton and stone-ground bread 
washed down with goat’s milk. Then, a foot soak 
(weekly, a full-body scrub), followed by deep sleep,

in a basement below a trap door — a peasant woman’s 
woven blankets softening the wooden floor boards 
and his heart. And when that heart rejoiced with freedom 

in ’45, at 13 years old, is truly when he understood why 
he detested the taste of lamb, no matter how gourmet 
the preparation offered the boy he once was — 

the boy who’d put meat back on his bones in Brooklyn, 
and the gastronome he’s become — a content 82 year old 
grateful for his hero Tito and the fact that he’s managed 

to keep his Hitler-torn past safely locked away 
in a tight-lipped box, he rarely chooses to open.
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