From Germany where i am now
A plane in sometime nineteenforty
From airfield, which? Thunder and shudder a plume of, what? Captained
Youth of seventeen, let’s say
-Seventeen is as far as England is-
And dropped his bombs over Manchester greater-
Where boy Ian to explosion dreamed:
The expanse of the moors and the ocean
The noise swallowed bricks of north. The expanse of the moors
In my grandfather Shmuel’s toothless mouth-
Jaw in perpetual skeletal yawn
Tunnel under bridge and darkness within.
“I’m from Manchester” said my grandfather’s keeper- hair red, but colored so.
“I’m Peggy” she said.
And later covered his corpse with the bedsheet.
Which of the bombs
switched on the dark?
Or was it not a BOMB but Blake?
Rudolph Hess or Raskolnikov?
Driving through Manchester watching kids,
Counting the buttons on their shirts
Pulling necklace off girl
Hindley says :
“You wont need this where you’re going luv”
— Amir Naaman is an Israeli short story writer and poet living in Berlin.