The sunlight sifts in cinders over Wall Street,
And sudden images out of the old war
Streak into mind: The late Atlantic Fleet
Out on the Hudson, flat as paper, more
Idea than steel, even then; the oracular beat
Of armies crossing borders; the gun color
The leaden fact, the vague figure of wind
That war assumes in a child's timeless mind.
A present sense of war is hard to keep.
I watch the immutable map of Europe shift;
When Paris falls, I falter, shocked, and weep;
I pray for the sturdy Dunkirk boats a swift
And lucky crossing; newsreel searchlights sweep
The staggered sky till there are no shadows left.
On American beaches only flecks of tar
From stricken subs and tankers tell of war.
But the air feels massive with hazard from the East,
The pioneer night, heroic with blackout. Day,
Severe in olive and navy, wears a cast
Of dream for all its drab.
If I found a way
When young to transform the murderous holocaust,
It was I knew Heaven would not allow the decay
Of Truth. Older than I, a generation died
For the victim Jews, for history, God on our side.
Truth triumphed. Out of the welter of bodies churned
In flaming oil off the coast of Iceland, out
Of the rubble of London, out of Hiroshima, burned
Vermilion, the one thing left alive a spout
Of water from a broken iron pipe, I learned
That truth is mixed with falsehood, belief with doubt,
We are Jew and Nazi both. Guilty, forgiven,
We suffer, we live. Iron and broken, we live.
I live, dreaming my childhood, dreaming that war,
As I stand in Wall Street, where I first heard of the blast
That felled Hiroshima. Both seem less simple, far
More human than I knew, their heroes cast
To history with their knaves. They live, this hour
Ambiguous with their lives. We change the past
By understanding it. Memories of my youth,
Sunbeams and cinders, sift their way toward truth.