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

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