April 2021
Bio Note: If I didn’t write, especially poetry, I’d probably be up for autistic in five
languages. A German-born UK national, I now live in Lima, Peru. While my heart occasionally rummages
in German, my mouth speaks Spanish, my spirit is playing in English, and I often have to look up a French
word in the dictionary.
Baggage
I have escaped the dark side of the stones
where only bugs hide. Slabs of hardness
gave no succor, but my frozen fountain
gave me water, gravel’s rasping voices
sang me to sleep, perhaps that's what it was.
You ask where I was born. I say Germany.
You think war. You think Jews. You think wunder.
I say childhood made from faulty pieces,
a puzzle with no satisfactory outcome.
Pockmarked playgrounds, dead rabbits,
rabble, rubble, revivals, renegades,
revelations. When the deluge comes again,
I shall open wide, let myself be cleaned.
I Have Always Been Afraid of People
No, not of my mother who made me porridge from home-dried
wheat ground in the coffee mill, or my brother who made me kites
from balsa wood and sandwich paper, grandfather who explained
the finer points of mushrooms and the call of the heron, the tail feathers
of the king fisher and the beauty of a beaver dam, neither that little
old woman with her beret poised coquettishly to one side, her
useless left arm on the armrest of the wheelchair who smelled
of camphor and all things decaying, or my uncle Ed who was home
on leave and let me tie his thick hair with ribbons, but of those
who would be my friends when the times were good.
©2021 Rose Mary Boehm
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