1945
The war in Europe is over.
Russians met Americans
on the bridge across the Elbe
and it is over.
I have seen pictures in LIFE
of bodies burned at Gardelegen.
I have read about captured girls my age
that Nazis kept in brothels.
The Mona Lisa will return to the Louvre.
My father in his chair
beside the lamp reads the news.
Now children who asked, “Will bombs fall on us?”
can look at the sky without fear.
Stretched on the floor, I am reading PERSUASION.
Mother has put a cake in the oven, chocolate.
She’ll call us to come taste it.
The globe of the world my father found
in a second-hand store has been installed, a glass globe
with a light inside and only one flaw,
a crack running from the North Pole to Madagascar.
Crickets are singing under the open windows.
A warm evening with dusk slowly falling.
The globe shines in the dark beside the bookcase.