I am close to where the camera-man captured Hitler
in black and white for his propaganda films.
I recognize the stone bleachers
despite passing decades,
bullet pocks and lack of pomp.
The weight of the past sits squarely on this place.
I can hardly breathe.
I have been here their whole life - a soldier
among the youth of this country -
but I don’t see the blood on their hands.
See the smoke from the camps.
Put my hands on the cold, wood slats of the box cars. I don’t
turn around and stare into the young
face of the gate guard at Dachau
while 5-ton trucks roared past heaped piles
of soil and lime barely covering the recent dead.
I’m trying to find my own context.
I’m trying to picture this sleepy city -
with its food vendors and sex shows
and young faces and night clubs playing American music -
with tanks rumbling through the streets.
Buildings as shadows,
skeletons in the heavy mis.
Snipers in church towers
and everything in black and white -
soldiers,
panzers,
barbed-wire,
cobblestone streets,
the recent dead.
I am not this thoughtful.
This is not me.
Matt Smythe hails from the Finger Lakes region of western New York. An Army veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Matt suffers from an inability to sit still. If he’s not in the woods, or on the water, he’s scheming ways to get there. His work has appeared in Free Range American, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Fly Fish Journal, The Drake, Southern Culture on the Fly, Revive, Midcurrent, TROUT Magazine, and a handful of other non-outdoors-related magazines and literary journals. He recently published a book of poetry with Dead Reckoning Collective titled Revision of a Man, where this poem was originally published.
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