"Me and Hitler at the Rhine"
---- Bruce Guernsey <yazaroo67@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear fellow "Take Heart" poets,
Wes McNair was very kind to use a poem of mine called "Extra Innings" for this year's Memorial Day in the Take Heart series.
Attached is an incredible photo of my father I'd like to share. It was taken when he was in Germany toward the end of World War II. He sent this to my mother and had written on the back, "Me and Hitler at the Rhine."
I was born around the time this picture was taken, and it's the first image of my old man I ever saw.
It's an honor to be one of the Take Heart poets.
Peace and grace.
Bruce Guernsey
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Eastern Illinois University
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Extra Innings
Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
This poem for Memorial Day week comes to us from Bruce Guernsey of Bethel. Bruce says that in the spring of 1987, his elderly father, a veteran and baseball fan, wandered off from a VA hospital and was never found. At the start of baseball season a few years later, Bruce wrote “Extra Innings” to resolve his father’s disappearance.
Extra Innings by Bruce Guernsey
The commemorative plaque on the trimmed lawn
of Indian Gap National Cemetery
has “Captain” inscribed before my father’s name,
the highest rank among the honored around him,
the other soldiers missing, I presume, in action,
unlike my zany Pop who simply wandered off,
AWOL one spring from the Veteran’s Hospital,
his furlough, eternity.
He always marched to an off-beat drummer
and then with Parkinson’s
became a wind-up toy soldier who’d charge,
head down from the disease, straight on,
elbowing my mother’s vases and crystal
on his way through enemy fire to the end of time.
Wherever he went that day, years ago now,
I see him leading a platoon
of men like those not there around him,
Purple Hearts and heroes, all of them, yes,
but not on this mission with a daffy Captain.
Instead, they’ve found their way
to some green ballpark,
the 9000th inning about to start
and beer for all forever:
just a bunch of happy ghosts,
waving to the camera.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2012 Bruce Guernsey. Reprinted Rain: Poems, 1970-2010, Ecco Qua Press, 2012 by permission of Bruce Guernsey. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books
Bruce,
What a magnificent picture of your dad and the "head" of Germany during WW II! I am going to steal it and put it on my blog, "Poetics and Ruminations.” I was eleven years old when that war ended in 1945, and everyone who fought in it was, and still is, a hero of mine. I have had the privilege of working with one of those great people for 37 years, the printmaker George O'Connell, who is 86; he also suffers from Parkinson's, like your father, and is unable any longer to create his marvelous art. We used to make a Christmas card together every year (our collection is in the Smithsonian's "Archive of American Art" now).
Thanks very much for sending this to me.
Lew Turco
Dear Lew,
Many thanks for your note. Those folks were my heroes, too.
I'm attaching a poem I wrote based on that photo. Perhaps you might want that on your blog, too. I hope so.
Be well.
Bruce
ME AND HITLER AT THE RHINE
The first time I ever saw my father
was in a picture he sent from the war.
“This is your Dad,” my mother said,
and I searched through the rubble fallen like blocks.
There, by the turret of a tank, a man was laughing,
holding on to some statue’s head, a head
with no body, marble and grim,
a bottle raised in his other hand.
“Me and Hitler at the Rhine,”
my mother read, laughing too and crying
at my father’s words on the back.
She was glad the war was over.
I saw my father for the last time today
and late, after the crying, the laughter,
I wake in the warm night to thunder,
to the sound of shells, the rumbling of a tank,
the walls, our whole house shaking, this house
my mother’s now alone, the endless halls.
In the lightning, sudden on the ceiling like a searchlight,
I can see the statue rise, massive and stiff—
in my chest can hear it marching, marching, in strict steps
striding toward the river now,
its right hand out and rigid,
a man’s head in its marble hand.
From Rain: Poems, 1970 ` 2010 by Bruce Guernsey
