The Denkmal

I worked on a German farm one summer.
Lunch was called supper by the family
and their workers spoke hunger but no English.
We cooked for twenty and together ate large amounts and used lots of dishes.
Afternoons were for naps and digestion
and walks on dirt roads with lightly-pressed paths.

I remember not-hearing planes or cars while walking,
just the breathing skies.
It seemed that the distance into quiet was small
as I crossed fern lawns and broke open drab, anonymous bushes.
There was a thrill inside these woods
as only a softly-padded, unimportant path can give.

I turned through untended apple trees,
curved around an abandoned field’s privacy
and then found this older forest patch.
Trees were left to reach and fall and reseed
with a coolness, a breeze of waiting.

Trees that were all oak-oak-oak.
Their grass footings embedded
with the fallen everything of trees.
I scuffed damp layers of acorn essence
and felt the whole world
resting in one, orphaned leaf.

My foot stopped at a chain attached to stone
a pillar low to the ground
and near the links were gray stone slabs
tired and lean.
Ten, huddling slabs staring.


I was at a denkmal, a memorial,
an impromptu gathering where
each stone stood for a life abandoned.
And in that place, unnoticed by anything but the forest,
was where soldiers, decades before,
had stopped to die.