Now that I am rescuing papers
from a burning attic
medical records, a death certificate

a divorce plea reads
you did to your second wife
what you did to my mother
and that it happened multiple times

Your brain tumor would bloom
years later       so that probably
wasn’t the cause, and it probably wasn’t
the shrapnel
lodged behind your ear.

Now that I see PTSD
written out in a psychiatrist’s hand
I hear the endless rain
in your long silences
the bombs in Berlin
smell the fire of burning buildings

now that I’ve learned
this was always something more
than bourbon whiskey could soothe
that Russian vodka
would only feed the flames
that good Scotch
is not an antiseptic

I touch a birth certificate
that tells me you were born
June 6, 1936
Do the math.

You were racing to hide
with a child’s spindled legs
yours, the duck and cover
of tiny hands

I remember my little brother
the day you vanished
remember he was building
a German airplane
cut from a sheet of balsa wood
how the wings kept splitting apart
when he tried to nail them down.

I remember you loved
the Red Baron, the legend
Manfred von Richthofen
how he flew dangerously low
to drop a payload of crimson roses
onto the grave of an enemy pilot

—but all that happened
in another war
a different wasteland
where an English poet
bombed the black earth
with lilacs—

Here in Berlin

it is not my job to hold airplanes aloft.
It is not my job to translate the German.
It is not my job to send telegrams.

It is my job to recall the content of this dream upon waking.
It is my job to find one small boy who stands alone
in the cooling cinders of Mitte.
It is my job to hold up a mirror
without ever letting it fall.

Gabrielle Langley is the author of Fairy Tale (Sable Books, 2023) and Azaleas on Fire (Sable Books, 2019). She has won the Lorene Pouncey Poetry Award and the Vivian Nelis Memorial Award for Creative Writing. Ms. Langley was also a spearhead and co-editor for the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the global epidemic of violence against women (Sable Books, 2016).