Eastern Front Anger
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My parents were German and were born in 1922 and 1930 respectively. Twelve years of madness reigned in the Third Reich from 1933 - 1945. Trans-generational transmission can both be academic and very personal.
Eastern Front Anger
The tiled oven exploded smoke and debris was strewn
everywhere in the room which had been untidy
before plasticine animals went up into flames
before authoritarian anger banged and exploded
before I knew what anger and emotion could be
and before I chose to forget the combustion
Neighbours stepped up and enquired if anyone else
had heard what had happened in the house that had
years ago been bombed blazed and smouldered
so many times so many fears ago during the war
My mother a child during those air-raids and fires
had thrown the incendiaries from attic and roof to the
street for Fuehrer fatherland and own bloody safety
Keeping outer appearance face clean washed in a rush
from smoke dust and tiled shrapnel from shame the
man said he heard just as well the other victim’s recall
of shattering houses dreams stolen childhoods and ceramic
fragments and the blasts from the past banging on
disorder plasticine wide eyed children faithful in soot
The story was told light heartedly amusing and often
changed meaning to funny and jolly most entertaining
along with the snow on the floorboards produced from
white oat flakes which in that same room had created for
beauty real child play creative landscapes next to the oven
Memories suppressed rejected denied forsaken forgotten
I now wonder if dry uncooked porridge flakes resembled
the winter white frost when boots were advancing towards
Moscow with death in the barrel and fear in the snow
The man combusting the child toys in anger was neither too
pleased nor enchanted with snow-flaked oat wonder-world
and untidy rooms and I was too young to connect the freeze
with dead bodies and killing and hunger with the smoke from
the camps the transgressions of human disgusting depravity
Too young to link the blast from the oven with shredding of humans
to charred bits and pieces but I wonder who did what why when
and how often for the man and his anger with no choice but forget
The man was my father and now that I know much more of all
the explosions which happened and happen and will happen again
could explode and combust with just the same anger enshrined in that
oven so huge and so massive in unspoken emotion's quest and regret
I accept that the man whose emotions unleashed so much anger when
confronted with oat flakes and oven still is that very same father
now dead and alive whom I still struggle to know
Copyright © Kai Michael Neumann | Year Posted 2016
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