Potatoes
When your brother found himself
on the front lines in France,
an officer yelled out, is anyone
a cook here? And your brother threw
up his hand and called back, I am,
even though he hadn’t really cooked
much. But he knew through his mother,
watching her in the kitchen, peeling potatoes,
plucking chicken feathers, slicing
the carrots for stew. So he started peeling
potato after potato, a bit surer, perhaps, in the result
of knife and spud than rifle and mud?
While his outfit picked up and moved out, your brother,
back at camp, put together what could be found
out of the foreign earth. Did his mother’s words echo
with each task? He cooked his way through the war,
potato after potato. He ate; these soldiers would eat.
Your brother had raised his hand, eager as a new soldier
with a mission. As the soldiers returned, he leaned
over pot after pot. He’d peeled and chopped.
When the ship docked, he’d step off.
First Marines In
If we are made of stardust . . .
Onto the charred rubble of
land as far
as you could see—
heaven, earth,
the bones
of Nagasaki.
We were there to claim
a foothold.
We were the living
among death
in a wasteland
with only the stars for light.
Looking for Father’s Boat
On the 70th Anniversary of D-Day
The film was black and white.
The ships were shades of grey; the men,
young and directed, the dawn at their feet.
Number 29. There’s 35, 36; there’s 9 in the background.
Dozens of grey ships move their iron bodies.
Some send out troops to the beach, men who will never return.
I’ve read the weather changed.
Father’s ship was never called to land, but stayed at sea.
Father was a gunner; he never mentioned it, except once.
He traveled to Europe—to France—and Japan,
as if part of a trip round the world. Walked in after
the bombing of Nagasaki?—flattened as far as one could see.
I was awed, and not in the way teenagers now use the word awesome.
I never knew, throughout childhood, of the combats he survived.
I’d never heard the particulars.
Meeting You at the Restaurant
It was a summer evening.
You walked in.
It was like any other evening
at first.
But as you approached,
something looked different.
You sat down
and seemed heavier,
as if weighted, so
weighted you appeared
unsteady. And your voice
wanted to be sure of itself.
So you talked about the war
for the first time
in a way in which it
surfaced in you,
and I detected color
in the whites of your eyes
as if something had changed
and the light in the room
seemed to be sunlight
and the words dropped from your mouth
like small grenades. I thought I would
pop. I thought something sinister had descended
and was coming in like a warplane. And when
you walked to the car and we had to steady you
along the walk to the door, I felt as though
I had been hit and as though I were losing
a part of my self when you set your body
into the car and turned the key. It was night,
but it was explosive it it it, what it was
that had lodged within you, like a bullet.
After Fifty Years, a Veteran Decides to Talk about the War
c. 1996
We were walking over
dead bodies. One moment
you’d be talking to a guy,
and in the next he was gone.
Take that BAR, the sergeant
yelled. But you know
the man with that gun’s
a target. And sure enough
the next guy who took
that rifle was dead. We
passed the sergeant, and
he didn’t say a word.
He didn’t say anything
as we stepped over
bodies and parts of bodies—
I don’t want to say more.
Note: BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle)
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the Seventh Annual Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award.. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals internationally, including Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. Her website is www.donnajgelagotislee.com.
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