Remembering Her Father
How could a decade separate?
How could time equal space?
She remembers his face
as if he were present.
Was it the war that took him?
He talked of walking into
Nagasaki.
He never spoke about the war
when she was a child.
But in his last years,
he offered information,
as if he knew of the future
sky.
She read his commendation,
a list of battles she had to look up
to decipher—how
did he survive them? All those years
as coach, baseball
league founder, driver, salesman,
never mentioning
war, as though he had left it
behind him
to spare her what it did not
spare him.
How she wishes he were here,
to hear his voice, to hear
his stories. She could write
about them. She could tell
everyone how he stared
at death and walked away.
If I visit Normandy,
will I look over the water, where Father’s warship
waited for orders? Something happened
when the weather shifted, and landing
was averted. Father watched
and fired, lighting the sky.
How I love to sit on the beach
but not any beach. And if I look long enough,
the blood may roll; bodies may fall.
Father’s ship may not have gotten
the order to wait, until no other order
was given and the sky exploded.
Would I explode, too, riveted on the beach
of these thoughts, so far away
from the truth of what happened
or didn’t happen? If I were to visit now,
how different it would seem, each
of us enjoying the buttered day,
the crisp but undulating morning,
only small swallows dipping from branch
to branch to ground, the sand pale
as the sun smolders behind cloud cover.
There’d be a brochure to read, a bed and
breakfast to tend to bodily needs. I’d jot
down, on some notepad, how visiting
is like taking the past from the mouth
of the ocean and hearing its echo, feeling,
as the waves rush in, what it must have been
like, in some small part, to set foot on the shore
with the bloody water smacking, the open-arteryed
beach sucking you in, and somewhere still out
on the Channel, another group of Marines holding
the waters like a territory that you could go back to,
where someone would be waiting.
Nagasaki
Nothing
between earth
and sky but
the vastness of
destruction.
Nothing to fight.
Nothing
but the land.
By night-
fall, the wings
of starlight,
a pale moon,
the boned earth
and the heavens’
understandable
cry.
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: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals internationally, including Cimarron Review, ISSUED: Stories of Service, 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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