My Father's Dream
A wide and vast horizon beckons me to enter there
where oceans echo ancestral voices and gulls paint images in the air.
The Saxons and Angles, Hansas and Norse of Hamburg, Oslo, Kiel and Gdansk
flows through my blood where the sea is my home.
Father, do you miss never having lived your dream of sailing around the world as you told me when I was young?
No, son, I am older now, and I lived my dream. Just standing here with you and looking across the horizon from this Golden Gate is enough for me, now.
And yet, I know, in some small way, I see from his eyes a glimpse of hope that I will fulfill his dreams in my future.
Now the book is closed, and my sermon is said.
My father rests but his dreams are not dead.
With tiller in hand and a gaze across the sea… I live my fathers’ dreams, and his father’s, and his before… sailing off to full fill my dreams… and reunite one day on God’s given glorious shore.
Martin Braun
2/14/2025
Thank you, dad, my Captain.
Categories:
gdansk, age, america, beauty, dad,
Form: Free verse
Snow falls on the brittle leaves of birch trees,
their branches miraculously overlooked by the December wind.
It makes a sound like the marching feet of scary Germans rushing through Poland.
Snow, mixed with freezing rain,
falls hard on the roof of an unheated barracks in Auschwitz,
filled with men and boys in pajamas.
It sounds not unlike the far-off thunder of the radio in the commandant’ s house,
the angry voice of the Fuhrer.
Snow, descending from the sky like shaved ice, on a brittle day,
5 maybe 8 degrees.
It covers the makeshift roadblocks in the streets of Warsaw,
making little mountains — so pure on the outside but fetid, rotten, corrupt beneath the fine powder.
This snow,
this ice falling to the ground,
sounds like Russian boots jumping over the mountains.
Rain in Gdansk,
a fine mist,
the smell of the sea.
It covers the streets, where men whisper things that will someday be heard
and old women fall on their knees to pray the Rosary.
This rain,
it smells of freedom.
Categories:
gdansk, holocaust, war, men,
Form: Free verse