October 1, 1939 / Port Of Hamburg

[October 1 1939]
We are travelling
Through a flat beautiful landscape
Writes my grandmother

Ancient forests
Trees like bewitched figures thickets of shrubs
In 1939
Farmlands small wooden houses
Blue lakes green village ponds

Her father arrested then released

Now and then cattle
Earth covered with high grasses

Fake passports

Enchanting places where one
Would like to stop
A steamship from Hamburg to Havana

Now a small wooden church
Now a village train depot
Six months on an island

I wish
Then New Orleans
I wish I could
Then a train to Los Angeles
I wish I could describe
Where she keeps a diary
I wish
Which I read on a different train
I wish I could describe each place to you
Almost eighty years to the day

[Port of Hamburg]
After school
They chant her name
She runs home
She prays

But caught because her father
Couldn’t quite believe
What ought to’ve been plain to see
‘till broken glass was at their feet
And now they could not wait
Some clothes and letters in a crate
Left the cat and drove away

Steamship
Wool sky
All seasick
The tide

She held her breath until
At last they’d got across
But they weren’t allowed to dock
All because the country didn’t want
To let those people through
Ain’t that a familiar tune?
I have to sing it back to you

History don’t have a chance
Drowning in the false fat present tense

And why would you need
To know anything
That happened any earlier
Than late last week?

Lucky one
She got in
Some papers signed
By distant kin

And every night she wrote
Six postcards sent back home
And when she read the brief replies
My grandmother would start to cry
The careful script it could not hide
The fear in every one
She read beneath the LA Sun
Until the letters did not come

History don’t have a chance
Drowning in the force-fed present tense

Why would you need
To know anything
That happened any earlier
Than late last week?
Than late last week?
Than late last week?